 Okay, as for where we're going to start with this little short discussion that we're going to have regarding personal finance and investing in economics and whatnot, right, or current economic systems or system that we're deciding to function in, right? The first thing you got to keep in mind is that, or basically the way, the one thing I keep in mind when it comes to talking about economics and personal finance and investing with people is that when the discussion of personal finance comes into play, what's really meant when someone asks me a question where, you know, what my opinion is where they should invest their money is, is that what they're really asking me is how are they going to become financially independent, right? How are they going to become free of debt? Okay, to be able to do whatever it is they want to do, right? How are they going to basically live as free human beings, right? Without the burden of day-to-day expenses overwhelming them. Okay, that's, that's the way I look at it when it comes to talking about economics and personal finance, okay? And as soon as we think about it on that level, and as soon as I start thinking about it on that level, there's five pieces of info, five bits of info that I have that I can give you or that I give people regarding personal finance and how they can become financially independent, the way they can maintain, okay? The first, the first rule for economics for me anyway is that there are multiple first rules because personal finance is very personal, right? It's really, you know, my financial needs may be completely different your financial needs, right? So keeping that in mind that there are multiple number one rules for different types of people, for different types of investment decisions, these are the top five things that in conversations I tell people to really focus on and don't really think about investing in anything else unless they've invested in the following five areas, okay? First and foremost, if you want financial independence, you have to be healthy, you have to be physically healthy, you have to be mentally healthy, you have to be emotionally healthy, okay? That's my first bit of advice to anyone that asks me how they can, you know, where they should invest their time and energy and money on, okay? The first thing I do is I look at them and I ask them if they're feeling healthy, if they're physically healthy, if they're mentally healthy, if they need to further their studies, right? If they're emotionally healthy, if they're not under stress where they need to take some time off, right? If they're physically ill, right? If they haven't taken their care of their bodies with certain organs, organs are shutting down or misfiring and the body's reacting by through symptoms, right? If they're not feeling physically well, first thing I tell them is to take care of the physical bodies, right? Either start exercising or start eating healthy and eating is a huge part of investing, right? Mental well-being is extremely important, right? Mental growth is extremely important, right? Because if, you know, when people are stuck in a rut, one of the best things you can do to get out of that rut financially, emotionally, whatever it might be, is to start learning new things, right? So, learning mental well-being, mental health is extremely important and emotional health goes hand in hand with that, right? If you're overwhelmed, then you're not making the best decisions that you can, right? Because you're under stress, so when you're under stress, there's a time constraint on the decisions you have to make, you end up making mistakes and those end up costing you a lot, right? Financially and otherwise, right? So, you know, if someone is under stress, the first thing I say is, you know, take a vacation, it might be a week, it might be a few days, it might be a few months if they can afford it, right? If they've already worked towards building a certain amount of financial freedom, okay? So, my first bit of advice to anyone that's looking to become financially stable is to take care of your health, okay? Extremely, extremely important. The second bit of advice that I have is to take into consideration the time frame that you have in mind, okay? And I can't emphasize this more because certain people when they want returns, they want dividends, right? They want it immediately, they want it within a week, so they invest their time and be able to get returns within a week. Some people do it for a month, some people do it a year, some people five years, some people look out 10, 15, 25, 30 retirement time, right? 50 years, 40 years, 30 years down the road, right? So, when you're talking about investing, you have to keep in mind the time frame that you're willing to wait to have dividends paid out to you, right? To have your investment start giving you some returns, right? So, keep that in mind. The time frame varies depending, again, on a personal level. The time frame that I might be looking at, right? For me, a month, a year, a few years, a handful of years is short term. Five to 10 years is medium term. 10 to 15, 20 years is a long term, right? For some people, they don't think that far, right? They're only interested in maybe the immediate future, right? And those are short-term investments. And that time frame, that type of investment varies depending on, you know, longer-term investments, right? In general, shorter-term is more risky than longer-term, right? So, consider the time frame that you want to invest in. And we're going to talk a fair bit more about this in the next couple of videos as well, right? We're going to break this down a little bit further, especially regarding time, because we've, you know, we put out a video sort of playing around with a little bit of ratios and mathematics and taking a look at quantitatively, mathematically, how the perception of time may vary depending on your age, right? I'm going to expand on that in one of the videos that we're going to put out for this playlist, okay? For this personal finance economics playlist. So, you know, those are my first two bits of advice. The first one, my number, my first two number one rules, make sure you're healthy and make sure you appreciate your timeline, right? The next three bits of advice that I have, and one of the things that comes up with a lot of people is if they need financial advice, it means that they're in general blowing their budget. And what that means is basically you're living beyond your means. If you're living beyond your means, then you're basically living as a slave because you're accumulating debt and that debt has to be serviced. You must, well, not must, you don't necessarily have to with certain systems, right? But there's a certain burden being put on you, right? So, if you're living beyond your means, it means you don't have as much freedom as you would if you live within your means, right? It means you're blowing your budget. So, what I end up telling people is, is to take a look at their expenses and manage their expenses because that's usually how people blow their budgets, okay, is by over, they're spending too much, right? And the best way to manage your budget, manage your expenses is to come up with a to-do list. And we've talked a fair bit about this in a couple of previous videos. One of them for mathematics, where we talked about how to create a to-do list. And a to-do list is extremely important when it comes to finances. Huge, huge, huge, right? So, if you want to know how to create a to-do list, which is basically your first step towards creating a budget, right? Take a look at that video. And we also did a video for math and real life. We're talking about mathematics of food and farming. We would talk to Marv and Vanessa and Marv showed us how they create a sort of a flow chart of how their business cycle is set up, where specifically when it comes to farming, what things they need to do to make sure that they're going to get crops at the end of the season, right? They can take care of everything, right? So, a to-do list and a flow chart sort of go hand in hand. There's certain things you need to do before you can do other things, right? So, you have to organize yourself. And if you want to know sort of, you know, if you're having a hard time managing your expenses, take a look at those two videos. They'll give you a pretty good idea of how to create a to-do list and how to put a flow chart together and how to do things in certain order just to make sure, you know, things are being done properly, okay? The next advice, the fourth bit of advice that I have for people when it comes to personal finance, specifically when it comes to them trying to invest in something, right? Maybe starting their own business or taking their funds and their energy and investing in a project may be for a company, for a corporation, maybe for a cooperative, right? Maybe just for the community, maybe for the family, maybe for themselves, right? Is if they have the means to build a good network, right? Which basically means to have people you can communicate either online or sitting down at a coffee shop or over tea or going for a run, a bike ride or a walk, right? Set up some kind of network where you can bounce off your ideas, your investment ideas with other people, right? Forums, the internet is amazing for this, right? It doesn't have to be in real life, right? Not that the internet is not as real life as well, right? But it doesn't have to be in person. It could be online. It could be virtual as well. Because when that happens, when you're bouncing off ideas, when you have a network set up, the one thing you do is if you have an idea and you share that idea, and that's one of the things about sharing, which is absolutely amazing, you get a lot of feedback coming in, right? So if you're thinking about doing something, if you share your idea, if other people have done, have tried what you're trying to do, right? They may have pointers for you to how to improve what you want to do. They may, you know, give you advice on what to avoid, right? That maybe took them down because any idea that you may have in large part, you know, has already been had. It is not ideas that are unique to us. It's the execution. It's if you can take an idea and make it realize, right? Make it happen. And that's why network is extremely important, because what you can do is share your ideas and get feedback, right? And the other thing you can do is reach out to your network and see what other people have tried and what has worked for them, right? Because one thing we do as human beings, we learn much faster through mistakes than doing things right, right? It's very weird, but it's not if we do end up doing things right all the time where we learn new things, right? It's when we make a mistake is when we learn new things and how to improve whatever it is that we're trying to do. And if we can learn from other people's mistakes, then we're way better off for it, right? Because learning from mistakes from five people, you learn a lot more than learning mistakes from just one person, from yourself, right? And the repercussions of learning mistakes that other people have made is way less than repercussions of mistakes that you may make, okay? So the fourth bit of advice I have for people is to set up some kind of network where you can bounce off ideas, okay? Learn, grow, share. The fifth advice that I have, and this is mainly for people who are younger, youth coming out of high school in general or university, okay? Or, you know, people that I've worked with, students that I've worked with that decide not to continue on with their education and they just want to go out there and live, maybe travel or maybe work, right? The advice I have for any youth, anyone that wants to get in, get a, get an appreciation of what it means to manage your finances and to be financially independent and to understand their current economic system is to get into the workforce as soon as possible or to start your business as soon as possible. Now, traveling is amazing. And for sure, if you want to travel and learn from traveling, stuff like this is fine and dandy. But make sure you're not a permanent tourist if you're traveling all the time. If you have, if you already have, you know, if you already have the funds to travel for multiple years without having to worry about your expenses, then that's okay. But keep in mind that traveling by not having to work in certain areas that you're going, you're a permanent tourist, you're not really getting a feel of what the societies have to go through wherever it is that you're traveling, right? So even if you're traveling on a long term basis, it's pretty good to do some work and learn the different economic systems that are available to you, right? Either locally, within your country, nationally, maybe continent wise or globally, right? If you're traveling, take a look around different economic systems. And sometimes that means working those systems, right? So if you're a youth, if you're graduating, if you're deciding to, you know, you've learned enough material to be able to function within our society, then get into the workforce as soon as you can. And if you're, you know, once you work somewhere, if you feel like you've maximized everything you've learned from that job, and you've gotten the most out of that job that you can, and you think if it's time financially that you have the means to be able to go seek out another job where you can learn more, don't be afraid to do that, right? Don't burn your bridges, don't walk into your boss's office and kick down the door and say, I quit, you guys suck. You know, if you want to move on to a different type of job, keep those doors open, right? Because you never know, sometimes you may have to go back. You don't know what the future holds. Sometimes you may need that safety net, that network, that connection for you to fall back on, to be able to have a job during hard times if you need to, or if you want to bounce off ideas from that, right? So never burn your bridges, or very seldom burn your bridges, okay? As far as starting your own business goes, if you are planning to start your own business, make sure you're not overextended. Make sure you don't borrow a ton of money and go into debt, either financially or through favors where you're putting all your eggs in one basket, and if, you know, the project that you're trying to start doesn't work out, you're going to be in debt and servitude for a number of years, right? Because that's a number of years where you could have been accumulating capital, having a rate of return instead of, you know, blowing your expenses, you're not being able to balance your budgets because you have to serve some kind of debt, right? So if you're trying to start up a business, make sure you do it slowly, okay? Make sure you do it slowly, because one of the, you know, there's two things that are the number one cause of people not being successful declaring bankruptcy for their business. One of them is they run out of funds, right? They don't have enough money to continue the business, right? Even though if the business may be growing, they don't have enough funds to be able to see them over that hump where they're in the black, right? Where they're able to maintain the business and actually have some returns coming in, right? That's why people go out and sell part of their business, okay? To be able to have enough funds to make them go over that hump. And another reason that people or corporations, companies or businesses fail is because they're not able to meet the demand, right? The company grows too fast, they can't meet the demand, the company collapses on itself or the business model collapses on itself, okay? So those two things are really dependent on you knowing the next step coming up if you're if you're planning on starting your own business, okay? But seriously, don't go on to use that initially for the first few projects you're going to do anyway, okay? So those are, you know, five bits of advice that I have for people. The health is huge. Maintaining good health is huge because the number one cause of people going out of the bankruptcy, they may be, you know, just making ends meet or extremely wealthy. I've seen a lot of people that are very, very well off, right? When health concerns hit them, right? When their health starts deteriorating, their funds deplete extremely fast and they're not able to generate more revenue and their finances completely collapse. Health is the number one reason. Ill health is the number one reason why people become financially unstable, where their finances basically collapse, right? Where they go into bankruptcy, where they lose everything, right? So it's extremely important to maintain good health physically, mentally, and emotionally. If you haven't done that, the first bit of advice I have for you is make sure that you're healthy, okay? Invest in yourself first. May it be eating properly, exercising, taking time off, learning whatever it is you need to learn to be able to progress in life, whatever you need to do, okay? So that's five bit of advice I have for anyone before we proceed any further into the next stuff that we're going to talk about, which is, you know, some of the notes I have in these booklets. And we're going to bring up the pen and paper, I believe, for the next subject, next topic that we're going to talk about. And I think we'll tackle the time factor in these five bits of advice that we should consider before thinking about investing anywhere. Or thinking about where you should be investing your money and your time and your energy on, right? So let's take a look at the time factor and see how we can visualize this and how that plays into our current economic system or current economic systems.