When I started my internship I immediately joined the 401K program as my company has a match and I like the idea of getting free money. I’ve invested that money in a Target date retirement fund and continue to do so. This has been a great decision.

After graduating to a full-time career, I wanted to save more for retirement. I opened a Roth IRA and started putting in the maximum amount every year, again investing the money in a target date retirement fund for the year that I plan to retire. 

I am on my employee’s insurance and contributed to a health savings account (HSA) while eligible. Again this is invested in a Target date retirement fund. 

The coronavirus hit in 2020 and cryptocurrency was booming. There was a new crypto called Helium which makes lots of sense from an engineering perspective. The miners do real work of transferring small bits of wireless data to the internet and it doesn’t take a lot of electricity. I wanted to invest in this technology and cash in on some of the rewards that it was producing. I bought four miners at $500 a piece for a total of $2,000. Based on the price of Helium coin, I predicted this investment would pay for itself in 18 months. Aaand that did not end up happening. To this day there is some $500 in my crypto wallet. It was a financial loss. 

Around this time my company again offered a employee stock option where your salary could be used to buy company stock. After holding the stock for three years the company would match some of it. As a new graduate I had no idea how long I’d be working at a company for, but after working there 3 years the idea that I would work three more wasn’t unreasonable and I was open to the risk. I talked to a coworker about it and he discouraged me from this investment stating that the S&P 500 would beat it. At the time my companies stock looked more like a sine wave with a very slight upward trend. I chose to invest anyways because the match was guaranteed free money.

My coworkers prediction would not have been unreasonable if the trend stayed its course. But that’s not what happened. And by the Lord’s Grace the stocks have done pretty well. 

I learned an important lesson: the future is not determined by the past. And I can’t predict the future. And if you want to make your money grow you need to risk it to an investment.

Just recently (2024) I started reading about investing and came across the boglehead approach. Everything about this mentality clicked for me. Because I can’t predict the future, I shouldn’t go gambling that a certain stock will increase in value. Instead I should buy lots of pieces of stock, totaling the entire market, called index funds. 

I’m looking to sell my company stock as I’ve received the match, and invest in broad market index funds instead. I am also looking to see if I can give my company stocks to charity instead to avoid capital gains tax on the investment.

My life is complicated enough. I don’t need my finances to be complicated. I am transitioning my banking to a Fidelity cash management account (CMA) so that at least most of my finances are on the same screen.  As a bonus the account pays way more than a standard checking account. They reimburse all ATM fees too!