Ask HN: How to save/invest/deal with money?

Depends on what you mean by pension. In the UK most modern workplace pensions and all self-invested personal pensions are similar to 401k in the US - all the money is contributed by you and/or your employer, you can access the money after a certain age, and you have control over how that money is invested in the meantime.

And for something like state pensions, once you have contributed for 10 years, you get the same pension; you don't have the option to contribute more so you can get paid more in retirement.

> Passive income only works for really wealthy people.

Investing doesn't necessarily mean passive income, and passive income doesn't need to be complete replacement for any other income to be a good idea. If you can put $5000 in stocks and get 4-8% a year return (unless it's your only $5000) that might be better than keeping it as cash and losing 8-10% to inflation. The percentage return you'll get will be the same as the percentage return a wealthy person investing millions in the same fund would get. And the returns you'll get from investing don't need to be lifechanging to make investing a better option than the alternative.

One quibble, the 401k match offered by some employers is not "free money", it is part of your compensation, just like employer-provided group health insurance, etc. If your employer does not offer a match while similar employers do, then you should expect more direct pay to offset the lack of match. And on that topic, don't invest your 401k money into your employer's stock, too much risk from lack of diversification.

1. Read the reddit personal finance wiki https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/index/

2. Read The Simple Path to Wealth by J L Collins

3. Read The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing

4. Read the Bogleheads' wiki https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Main_Page

5. Use a personal finance app to track budget and spending (I use Simplifi).

6. Track your Income, Expenses (just the broad category), Bills (per invoice), Assets, Debt on a spreadsheet with columns per month. I make it easy and put the hyperlink for the source of truth in the name of the row.

7. My general rule is that I need to have at least 50% savings each month from combined investments and income. This percentage is more defined by what year you want to "retire" and switch from capital accumulation to capital spending phases of your life.

8. This is the step I'm on now. I'm trying to learn finance in a far deeper capacity, so I'm spending time to learn accounting, finance, trading strategies. I'll run various accounts with different strategies and see how it goes. Those strategies will fall under the "speculative" part of my portfolio, which won't exceed more than I can afford to lose and still hit my retirement targets.

Start by going to vanguard.com and opening a brokerage account. Use the website to set up automatic investments into VTSAX.

Then you can investigate @robcohen’s advice at your leisure. The important thing is to just get started.

(I’m not sure if you can use Vanguard from Europe. It’s a good place to start, at any rate.)

If you can put together a rough plan for the budget for that, you might cap your liquid savings at 6-12 months of ongoing expenses plus an estimate of your one time expenses. After that, responsible long term investments. Of course, it's not a bad idea to put some amount into long term responsible investing now.

Not knowing what country you're in makes it hard to recommend specifics. For your short term savings, you want something safe (government guaranteed if you live in a stable economy) but shop around to different banks and see if any give better interest than others. For your long term savings, you want some sort of brokerage and investing in a broad index fund of some sort; if you have access to Vanguard funds in a tax appropriate way, their index funds are more or less the benchmark for low cost index funds. Depending on your local tax laws, it may be better to have a locally domiciled fund, or an Ireland or a US domiciled fund. Ideally, you're able to use a brokerage that is low cost, but established. The US benchmark is zero fees for the brokerage account and near zero fees for trading ETFs, and a broad stock index expense ratio should be around 0.1% or less. That's not available in all countries, but look around and see. There's also plenty of US options with more fees and bigger expense ratios, but IMHO, those expenses don't get you anything worthwhile.