l grew up in a middle-class family of 6, me being the oldest kid. We did okay. We had a roof on top of our heads, fridge full of food and always clean & unbroken clothes to wear. Money was never a topic of any our conversations. And I never paid any attention to that as a child! Money was present as a form of payment when going to the store, but it was never truly “present”. I was never taught how to save money or what investing is. But I guess that was okay since I probably had better things to worry about at the time.
I got some weekly/monthly allowance ranging from 5-20€ depending on if I had done my share of chores and how school went. But that money always disappeared surprisingly fast to candy, sodas and fast food. Wise I know, though they felt important purchases at the time.
To summarize, I was taught nothing about money.
I moved to my first own apartment after completing mandatory military service in 2017. The apartment was a small 40m2 and the rent was a whopping 425€ / month. I worked at a grocery store bringing home approx. 1600€ so one might think I had plenty of money to work with in a monthly basis. Wrong! Somehow that money was just gone almost as fast as it arrived. I was never able to put any money aside for future expenses, and having some money on so called “savings account” felt like I had all the money in the world, and it needed to be used quickly. The money was used to stuff like video games, restaurants, clothing and other “must have” items such as new phones and subscription services. Oh boy would I like to slap my younger self right now.
I did open a brokerage account to Nordnet in the middle of 2018 and bought 50€ worth of Finnair – shares. Then sold everything a few months later. I still today think to myself why did I do that! Not the selling part, but opening a brokerage account. I have absolutely no memory of where I got the idea to open up an account or how I ended up buying that specific company shares. After selling the shares I did absolutely nothing with my account until early 2020 when I really got into investing.
I first started to pay real attention to my finances early 2020. The pandemic had just started so I had quite a lot free time in my hands. I still worked at a grocery store although it was a different one than the 2017 shop. My net income was approx. 1700€/month. My living expenses had gone up a little bit due to moving to another town closer to the capital = bigger rent. I first started to write down my income to a little booklet I had just bought. From the income I then deducted all the rough estimates of my monthly bills and from what was left over I put some aside to an actual savings account. I didn’t know anything from investing yet, other than the 2018 play with a single stock of which I still don’t have a clue of what I was thinking.
Few months flew by and I created my first Google Sheets to track my income (I still use the same Google Sheets today, although heavily modified version of the original one) to which I was eager to put numbers in each month. At the same time one of my friends told me while we were watching a movie that he had bought some stocks using the same platform I had opened my account with. I asked him a few questions but realized that he had no better information about the purchases than I did back in 2018. We laughed it off and continued to watch a movie. But somehow that short conversation stuck with me and I quickly found myself looking for information about investing. And oh boy did a new world just open up to me. The idea of compound interest was something I had never heard of and seemed like a good way of becoming rich quickly (yeah I know). Everything was new and fascinating. Stocks, index-funds, mutual funds, bonds, options, derivatives and all the other stuff. It felt like a gold mine. I quickly dug up my login credentials, deposited 50€ to the account and picked the first index fund just to get started somewhere.
The amount of information available was practically infinite since new writings about “invest in this / invest in that” were popping all the time. And also all the material that was written before -> I had some catching up to do.
As time went by I gathered more information about investing and budgeting my income / expenses better. I started off as someone who had absolutely no clue about money other than it was a way of getting things from the store to someone who actually has his finances under control, tracks everything and is eager to achieve financial independence.
But where am I currently? As of 2024, I now lead two different bank teams here in Finland. I have two beautiful daughters to whom I will teach every bit of knowledge I’ve already gained (and will gain since this is a lifelong journey) and an amazing wife who shares some of my interest to finance as well. Not fully, but some!
Now you got a glance of what my financial history looks like. I’m super happy that you are reading this, since starting a blog has been almost like a dream of mine of some sorts. I hope that you will gain some ideas from future posts to yourself and maybe you’ll be able to incorporate some to your everyday life.
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I invite you to achieve financial freedom with me.
– Valtteri