Note that some of this pertains to American finance, but the concepts are universal. Readers are encouraged to research the material as this is by no means exhaustive.

Table of Contents

0. Personal Finance Flow Chart
1. Investing as robot miners analogy
2. Control Yourself

Personal Finance Flow Chart

The above Personal Income Spending Flowchart (author credits on chart) is really all there is to it. There is no need to buy a subscription service, or follow strangers on Twitter and Youtube for secrets to financial management success.

It really is this simple, but understand that nearly everything is out to make it as hard as possible for you to follow this. Modern Western culture worships the next-best-thing, and keeping up with your neighbor runs rampant. Advertising is an entire industry designed to make you think you haven't "won" unless you have "X". If you can overcome this, it will serve you very well.

Analogy of Robot Miners

An analogy I like for investing is mining. Everyone is aware of mining: the effort to extract valuable resources from the ground such as precious metals or minerals. These are then exchanged or sold to make products or energy. Consider for a moment that you are a miner, using your time to extract resources (e.g. money) for the benefit of yourself or others.

Obviously you are limited in the time available to you to extract as many resources as you can. What if you could obtain additional miners, who could work to extract resources at the same time, or even while you sleep?

Think of every penny you have as an individual robot miner. By taking these miners and putting them to work on resources (investing), each one will return something of value to you.

Control Yourself

One of the weakenesses of modern Western (and perhaps moreso American) culture is that it is never content, manipulated to extract as much wealth from you as possible--the pursuit of things. Understand that modern western culture claims to offer contentment in the form of things, but it will never satisfy.

And I saw that all toil and all achievement spring from one person’s envy of another. This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind. - Ecclesiastes 4:4

Something to continually ask yourself when spending your own resources (this may be represented as time or money!) is "how does this benefit me" (or someone else)? Let's use a typical popular Youtube channel as an example. When watching, you are trading your resource, time, to view the product of another individual (the video). This time is turned into money for the content creator by Youtube exchanging your time for money, advertisers transferring your time for money, or your purchases AND time being exchanged for money. What would be more beneficial, spending your time on things that benefit you, or things that benefit someone else (but has the illusion of benefiting you in the form of entertainment)?

For some homework, take some time and watch the documentary "The Century of the Self" by Adam Curtis.