Financial advice you never asked for
December 2025
There are rumblings that Gen Z and Millennials are getting financially screwed. There is some truth to this, intergenerational screwage is a tale as old as time. Back in the 1980s, car loans could carry 18% interest and new mortgages 14%, while your grandparents were sitting on 3%, 30 year loans the banks were desperately trying to buy back. Today is arguably worse for young people, there is a housing shortage and real estate pricing is crazy, good jobs are hard to find and yearly salary raises are a joke. One band-aid solution is to make cheap town homes out of materials not much better than cardboard so you can live in cramped quarters while paying an exorbitant home owners association fee.
Money woes go well beyond generational categories. The world is a financial pyramid, and the people above you are often secretly laughing at you. You are not going to change this until everyone wakes up and fights back. Meanwhile, try to tune out rich people's lamentations. It won't do you any good to listen to 50 Cent's I get Money. You are an engineer, enjoy your career, don't focus on what you ain't got. If you read this page entirely, I will review some financial advice books and provide you with my own advice that will allow you to be known as a Big Spender in your retirement years. Results may vary and past performance is no indication of future results! If you think I come off as some financially lucky Boomer with no clue to today's problems, sorry, not sorry. Just trying to help! Also, I don't have any knowledge of saving for retirement outside of the US, I assume your government will step in and you won't go hungry or can't afford decent health care. Lucky!
Financial advice books and talk
Financial advice seems to be a growth industry. There are countless books on the topic, and the Dave Ramsey Show fills in a lot of otherwise empty bandwidth on your grandfather's AM radio. Let me start by providing my opinion on some of these advice peddlers.
Ramsey has written 10 books on financial advice, and hosts a syndicated radio show. No one has milked financial advice as hard as him, and now his daughter is in on it.
His advice is to live debt free, that will solve all of your problems. Until you are debt free, you need to subsist on a diet of rice and beans. In retiring your existing debts, Ramsey says you should pay them off from the smallest to the largest. This makes no sense at all, you should pay them off in the order of highest to lowest interest rates. Guess what? Debts can be leveraged into future money!
I do agree with his advice that you should only carry a 15 year mortgage on real estate. He does make one other excellent point. Gambling, especially on-line sports betting, is about the stupidest thing you can do with your time and money. If you send your kid off to college and you find out he/she has bookmarked Draft Kings on that laptop you paid for, kick them off the payroll.
Ramsey taps into his evangelical religion in his financial advice. Religion and money are two topics in your life that don't need to cross. What the hell did Mathew, Mark. Luke and John know about 401Ks, tax returns and crypto?. He hates "wusses", and he advised people to NOT wear a mask during the recent pandemic. Like most radio hosts, he is a paid shill for a litany of companies hawking insurance policies, tax advice, and realtors. Often his hillbilly accent seems to show up... "today" comes out as "ta-day". He also tries to sound edgy by using the adjective "freakin'" ten times an hour. Bleah.
Finally, why do people call up a national radio program and expose all of their personal financial information?
Even though it is 30 years old, this book is probably the only one I recommend. It teaches to not waste money, but it can be extreme. I particularly can't abide their statement "There's only two types of beer, Budweiser and free". You don't need to live like a monk. The theme of the book is that money in the bank is a way better measurement of financial success than money you burn though. I totally agree.
The book postulates the following theorem:
"Multiply your age times your realized pre-tax annual household income from all sources except inheritances. Divide by ten." that is what they say that you should have for accumulated wealth.
Let's take a look at that idea, with a middle-of-the-road engineering income, as engineers often do, in a graph. Your salary and supposed wealth accumulation is on the left, for simplicity all dollars are assumed in today's value. You start out at a salary of $71K and end up at $171K in my example. Your raises are plotted on the right. Raises are pretty good in the beginning, but they die out as you enter middle age. The spike raises are your promotions, on the path toward Engineering Fellow or wherever you end up. When you retire you have somewhere over $1M saved; including social security you might be living on $100K per year, a pay cut of $71K from your working years. You might not realize this now, but you are not going to hold the title of Big Spender in your sunset years. You might even need to downsize your house to reduce your monthly bills.
Let's modify the accumulated wealth curve to be more realistic and more aggressive. When you are 22 you have no money, it might take you until 30 years old to hit the "Millionaire" investment goal. You stay on track up until age 45 and slow down on your investments... why? You are paying for your kids college education, unless you suck at life. When you hit 55 you are back on track, then you speed up your investments all the way to retirement. Part of this happens automatically through equity growth in your savings. Your kids are out of college and you paid off your house. Now you can get to a more reasonable $2M goal. You won't be filthy rich in retirement, but you can draw down $100K from your assets each year and you will also get social security worth another $50K. You will have to live on less than you used to during your working years, but you will not be considered poor.
If your parents have their $hit together, you might get a nice bump from inheritance when they pass on. That was not taken into account on the above analysis.
Vivian is "your rich BFF". Her life story is a remarkable, from the daughter of immigrants to a highly successful and lucrative multi-path career in male-dominated fields. She writes books and does podcasts on how you can live like her by changing your mindset, which is often wishful thinking. Remember Trump University? Her best advice is to be a squeaky wheel at work so you don't get passed over by co-workers. She is big on detailed budgeting using the tired 50/30/20 rule that dates back to at least 2005 (the Mesopotamians might have first used this rule). She wants you to understand your finances, a noble goal I support, even If I don't spend more than a few hours a year thinking about where my money goes. I took a short course in Economics years ago. I quickly got bored with discussions of M1 and M2. I am a much bigger fan of Thing 1 and Thing 2.
She is big on spending as a form of self-gratification, I disagree with this. Trust me, you don't need a stupid $5000 Prada bag or a $2000 Yeti cooler. She won't yell at you for spending ten bucks at Starbucks every morning, but I will. Their coffee is over-rated, and you don't need a venti caramel crunch frappuccino with extra pumps of dark caramel sauce, bananas, whipped cream, and extra ice. Did you ever wonder why your jeans no longer fit?
Vivian Tu started out on Wall Street, one of the magnetic money poles of the US (the other being Washington DC). Average earning on Wall Street would surprise you,. In life, making a pile of money seems to make people think that their opinions on everything are solid gold. I will be the first to admit that maybe my opinion is worth nothing to someone else. We are engineers, if we really worshiped money we would have done the Wall Street thing and been even better at it. Vivian will tell you to get a side gig walking dogs, while her side gig (peddling her books on her TikTok channel) is of course a pot of gold.
She talks about setting boundaries with friends and relatives that need money. Don't be a cheapskate. If a niece needs money to pay for college, fork it over, and don't even try to call it a loan. If she forgets to thank you, that's pretty normal these days, your thanks will be that she no longer needs to depend on the kindness of strangers.
Tu is also big on negotiating. She claims to have negotiated a real estate broker fee from $8000 to zero. I'll take "Things That Never Happened" for $200, Alex...
Finally, she is very fond of the F-word, presumably because it makes her sound edgy. I'm sure you know people at work that over-use expletives, but at least they did not publish them in their life's work.
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Robert Kiyosaki, Rich Dad Poor Dad, 1997
Poor people buy liabilities, rich people buy assets. That's good advice. But stating that going to college, getting good grades and landing a good job is setting you up for the "rat race" is BS. Engineers, if you did it right, actually like their jobs. Accounting is boring. Sure, owning a company can make you rich, but it can also make you bankrupt and affect your health. Kiyosaki is quite the story teller, much of the stuff he claims he's done could populate the rest of the Jeopardy category of "Things That Never Happened". Like buying a house and selling it for a huge profit in a couple of days. Buying a house at a courthouse auction using borrowed money, then quickly selling it for a fat profit sounds great. With a lot of luck might work when real estate is hot, but getting what you want for a house is usually a waiting game. While you are waiting you will be paying taxes, insurance, utilities and hopefully you are repairing some of stuff that would frighten off regular buyers. Good luck. Real estate flippers are not exactly thanked by neighbors.
Real estate as a hobby will be the topic of the next Unknown Editor rant, count on it.
My free financial advice
Live below your means should be tattooed on the back of your eyelids. Then you can spend without considering a budget during your retirement, even if you live to 100. Want to spend a month in Europe? Do it. Want to build a four car garage and collect some classic cars? Easy peasy. You might get a senior discount at some stores without asking for it, but you won't have to beg for it. You should never have to clip coupons.
What should your situation be at the day you retire? Here is a suggested goal for a married couple: $5M in today's money, spread out equally in untaxed retirement accounts, after-tax accounts, and real estate. Aim high, if you fail by a few dB you will still be all right. If you like to cheat on your spouse, you might want to increase the goal to pay off the lawyers when you split up.
If you amass $5M at age 68 and live to 98, even if you spend $250K per year you are likely going to add another digit to your net worth and become a deca-millionaire just from compound interest. You should consider where all that money will go when you die, it's not fair to your kids to leave them so much dough that they no longer have to work. How about putting your name somewhere at your alma mater?
As engineers do, let's distill the rest of my advice down to two PowerPoint slides.
Here's some things you should do
- Know your financial situation by adding it all up twice a year. As my wrestling coach would say, "know where you are on the mat" (which was a code word for pushing off the mat before you get pinned). Pick a goal and keep track of your progress periodically.
- Maximize your retirement contributions every year. You can choose between taxed and untaxed accounts. Maximum means the most you can legally do, not just up to your employer's match.
- Pick your retirement fund investments based on stable past performance. Don't even think about investing money in your employer's stock!
- Bring your lunch to work, don't go out every day. Not only will you eat healthier, you will save a ton of cash.
- Consider real estate as an investment, in particular, rental properties.
- Whenever you mortgage a property, pick a 15 year one. Yes, it takes away from your cash flow but it builds equity. Interestingly, rich people often take "interest only" mortgages. Why would they do that? It's because they make more money in their hedge funds than any real estate could appreciate. Hear that laughter, they are laughing at you...
- Pay for your kids college education, even if you paid for your own. Don't be a tool.
- A side gig is great, but you are not really banking any money driving for Uber. It's no longer possible to make money with a content web site (thanks to AI), but you could take a try at being an influencer on YouTube or TikTok, like Atara Byte.
- Once you get to a fair amount of savings like $500K, employ someone to manage your money. Fidelity and many other companies offer such a service.
- Be nice to older relatives, they might leave you an inheritance. If they are unpleasant, try not to sit next to them at family gatherings
Here are some things you should NOT do.
- Don't worry about every dollar you spend. But be very worried if your net worth is not increasing year-to-year.
- Don't engage in more than one expensive pastime. Do you like skiing, boating, golf and private aircraft? If you do them all, your retirement bucket has multiple holes in it. Now pay attention to Hank Williams:
Hank Williams Senior, My Bucket's got a Hole in it.
- Do you like to drive new cars? Get a job where you get to travel and enjoy what the a new rental car. If you insist on owning a new car at some time in your life, only buy with cash. One new car per decade is more than enough. And don't buy some huge gas guzzler to commute in. You are not a rock star, you are an engineer, live like one.
- Never accumulate a balance on your credit cards, make sure you pay it off every month. But feel free to use them instead of carrying around a thousand dollars in cash like Diamond Dave Ramsey implies you should do. Did you ever lose your wallet or get robbed? Your credit cards can be protected but your cash will soon be traveling up someone's nose in powder form.
- Going to Vegas to gamble and claiming you "always win" is a red flag on yourself.
- If you want to play the stock market, keep your "investments" small and outside of your retirement money. You might get lucky. Just as likely, you won't. A good exercise for playing the stock market is to take $1000 in cash and flush it down the toilet. If that does not bother you, play on!
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