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.

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.