The links on this page contain affiliate links on which I may receive a small commission at no additional cost to you. All product recommendations are things I enjoyed, independent of the affiliate relationship. Any affiliate commissions go to help support the further growth of this site.
Book Recommendations
If I’m recommending a book, that means I’ve read it.
It doesn’t mean I agree with everything in the book.
As someone who is an avid reader (I average over 50 books per year) of all things personal finance and development, I hope that list gives you great options as you go about your journey.
If you think I’m missing something that’s great, I’d love to hear about it. I’m always looking for recommendations!
This list will be updated regularly, so check back to see the changes.
Top Money Picks
Credit Cards
I’ve always lived by this rule with credit cards: if you’ve ever not been able to pay your card on time you shouldn’t have credit cards anymore.
Cut them up, Dave Ramsey style!
BUT, if that’s not a problem for you, there are a ton of great cards and benefits out there.
My favorite is the Southwest card. On sign-up you get huge bonuses and if you have a business you can apply for the business card as well.
We’ve used this to get the Southwest companion pass, which means when I fly my wife flies free.
This has allowed us to travel super cheaply!
If interested, you can sign up using my referral link here. It costs you nothing but helps me get more free travel.
If you want to learn more about leveraging these cards, reach out and I’d love to help!
Investing
Just a caveat here: everyone has different preferences when it comes to investing. Some like simple, some like trading, some like… o who the heck knows.
This list is specific to my style of investing: passive, mostly index fund investing.
I like to allocate my funds into a few categories: US, international (emerging & developed markets), REITs, Cryptocurrency, and Emerging Industries. In the future, I’ll post more of my methods and reasons, but crypto and emerging industries make up no more than 10% of my total portfolio (approximately 5% each).
Depending on where you are in your journey, this might not be right for you. So please don’t take this as a prescriptive solution. You need to make your own choices.
General Investing
For general investing (401k, Roth IRA, taxable accounts, etc.), I prefer Fidelity and M1 Finance. Vanguard is also a great option, but tech wise it’s not great. I love Fidelity because it has a lot of options and a good interface.
But, if you’re wanting the most simple solution possible, M1 Finance is the way to go. On M1 Finance, you create “pies”, which are just a fancy way of identifying how you want your money to be allocated. Once you’ve setup your “pies”, you just deposit money and M1 Finance does all the work to keep your allocations correct.
There is even an automatic rebalancing option! While I don’t use it, it’s great for those who like to rebalance.
If you’re interested in M1 Finance, use my referral link to get $50 when you fund your account.
Cryptocurrency
In some ways, I was a little hesitant to make this section or discuss this type of investment. But, no matter what I think, people are investing so I think it’s better to address it than ignore it.
First things first: if you do not understand crypto, do not invest in crypto. Too many people have FOMO (fear of missing out) and make the decision to buy crypto because they see others do it. This is never a good investing strategy.
Cryptocurrency is new and something everyone is trying to wrap their mind around. What does this mean? It means that it’s purely speculation.
This doesn’t mean it’s good or bad or the other. You may have strong convictions about crypto and thus be willing to allocate more.
I have pretty strong convictions about the future of crypto, but know that I cannot know who will win. Because of this, I limit all combined crypto bets to no more 5% of my total investment and retirement portfolio.
So why 5%? 5% is small enough that if it went to zero it has a tiny impact to my overall plan. Yes 5% is still a lot… but with compounding, 5% lost today is more like 1% of less of my final outcome. That’s a bet I’m willing to make because it is an asymmetric bet.
What is an asymmetric bet? An asymmetric bet is a bet where the upside is much higher than the downside. With cryptocurrency, if I invest $100 I can only lose $100. But because of stock to flow, adoption, and so many other reasons… the upside could be 10, 20, or 30 times my initial investment.
So, enough of my rambling. For cryptocurrency, I use BlockFI and Coinbase Pro.
BlockFI provides trading and interest accounts in which you can earn interest of up to 7.5% on your cryptocurrency holdings.
Coinbase is easy to use and if you upgrade to Pro has low transaction fees. It also has a lot more cryptocurrency coins that you can explore.
Both of these solutions are introductions to cryptocurrency. There are hardware wallets, NFTs, mining, and so much more. I’m never going to teach on those, so find that elsewhere. These recommendations are just for those wanting the initial exposure and make for easy entry points.
If you click the affiliate links below, you can get $10 Bitcoin rewards when funding your account.