Figure out how you're gonna build your money

Money is sorta simple: you get money from working, pay your bills, then hold onto it and make decisions on what you want to spend your saved money on. However, you don't get as much money as you think you do by socking it away in a bank's savings account for your entire life. Things like monetary inflation will lower your spending power as time goes on and it's up to you to work around it.

The economy is a complicated beast, but we've developed concepts and institutions for getting returns on our monetary investments. There are two major engines for "average" people to making money work for them: investing in the stock market and retirement accounts. I made sections for these two engines individually because there's a lot of complexity in them, but they enable the average person to invest in others to get a return on their investment.

I'm going to break this article on J.P. Morgan's website about building your personal wealth into several pages.

Connect with a financial advisor

Unless you've got financially savvy friendly, you probably only have the simple view on money I described earlier. Maybe you're an internet go-getter who will search for financial info on the internet, or find some online financial persona to talk to, or even worse you consult ChatGPT; skip that part and go talk with someone who knows what they're doing. Find a financial advisor, ask questions, learn the lingo, and get set up. You can look up the things they tell you later and make decisions from there.

What's nice about banking with a big-name bank is that they'll often have some resource to help you really get your money up. It's in their best interest to see you get your money up because that means you become a customer of theirs. See if your bank, credit union, or whatever service you use for storing & saving money has a financial advisor available. I have "a guy" (financial advisor) at the bank now and I've known him for almost a decade from when I'm writing this. He's gotten me through the roller-coaster of life as my income started to become "real" after college.

J.P. Morgan has an article on when you may want to work with a financial advisor and what you should start out asking them. It's biased towards JPMC clients but it hits all the key points and takeaways. Just know that when you connect with a financial advisor, there's gonna be some give-and-take via paying them. If they're through your bank and you set up financial investments in stocks and such, they may shave a bit of your earnings via investments off the top as payment. They may charge you a fee per meeting instead as commission.

If you have a guy at the bank who can bring you into the fold, you're much more likely to connect with people who are also getting their money up. A friend of mine I played online video games with for years is now someone I also occasionally talk to seriously about what the market looks like and get advice from.

Your advisor is human too!

If you do get a financial advisor, remember that you're also going to be developing a professional relationship with your advisor. You're usually able to switch advisors at the bank or investment firm, but most advisors will be competent and personable. Get ready, because your advisor is not only going to get to know about who you are on a borderline intimate level, but they're about to become a new fixture in your social life.

They'll call you to check in on you, see what you're feeling about the economy, check if you want to put more money into your investments (part of their job to drum up business), and will be on tap if you want to ask questions about your portfolio or get opinions about what's hot and what's not. They're gonna ask a lot of personal questions in regards to your income, your financial situation, what your family is like, and your hopes for the future. All of that goes into helping build you a portfolio.

My advisor is cool; he's only a bit older than I am (only two or three years I think) and he's got an interest in the vidya as well despite being normal, as opposed to someone like me who spent his formative teenage years and beyond on various internet communities, so we'll spend time just shooting the shit about video games and life.

This comes with its own social "costs". Example: I don't really consider it a "cost" because I voluntarily did it, but I got some socialization time in with my advisor by playing Super Smash Brothers Ultimate with him. Some readers will 100% joke about this in a variety of ways, but this helped me build considerable rapport with him and I'm no longer just a fair-weather customer who he'll routinely check in on; he'll ask me how tech companies are doing and which ones I might consider as on the upswing an industry insider.

Another example has an actual financial cost associated with it, but again, I consider it voluntary: while I'm not a heavy drinker in any regard, there's a sports bar near the Chase Manhattan in our town, and we'll get a few drinks and chit-chat without the burden of being in the office or either of us being on the clock. I'd like to stay inside and GAME but I gotta go out, pay for a drink, keep a discussion going, then get a ride home. It's enjoyable and I would go so far as to consider him a friend rather than a professional acquaintance, but it's still social maintenance I have to partake in.

If you get an advisor you jive with, you'll get more bang for your buck if you invest socially as well. If you don't jive with them personally, just make sure that you establish a good relationship; check in on them every so often, even just dropping by to ask a question and exchange pleasantries.

Know where you stand

Before you link up with a financial advisor, it's not enough to have a vague idea in your head about your money from when you last checked your bank account. Grab pen and paper and document everything so you know what you've got. Write down:

your income
any credit cards you have
any outstanding debts unrelated to credit cards
what you have in savings
what your monthly expenses are

When you connect with your guy at the bank, they'll help you make sense of all this information.

Define goals

Short term monetary goals are things that happen over days, weeks, or months. Examples:

Didn't spend that $2 on a big disposable water bottle
Put $50 in savings every Friday
Pay down that loan every month

Having a "rainy day" or emergency fund is a great short term goal for everyone.

Long term goals are things that happen over months, years, or even decades:

Invest in a company that looks like it will perform well in the next 5 years given the market
Figure out what you'd need to make to squeeze a mortgage payment into your life for the next decade
Calculate a deposit cadence to ensure your retirement account will exceed $3 million in 40 years

Short term goals typically require "small" amounts of money but have strict due dates, i.e., bills and debt repayments. For most people not coming from wealth, short & long term goals are usually worked on in tandem with the short term goal receiving more focus. Long term goals are, by their definition, achieved over a long period of time. A trickle of money going towards long term goals tends to accrue value over time due to things like interest, so it's fine to start small until you resolve your short term goals.

Do the simple thing

Once you've got your information and your goals, get to work. Most banks and financial institutions like credit unions have automatic transfers, make good use of them. Investigate the various features of your financial institution's webapps.