Investing at 21 my entire college fund. I wasn’t going to use it anyway.

Bitcoin.

Getting a master’s in electroacoustic music. Everyone told me I was going to stay poor forever, I decided to still do what I really wanted and it’s going pretty well.

Not buying a boat

1. Started a small mutual fund and retirement fund when I was just starting out and still in undergrad. I did not have much and was fully self sufficient. But someone came to my job and showed us how retirement plans worked and convinced me to start one. Same with a mutual fund. I never put more than $20-$40 in each because I didn’t have much but boy did that pay off.

2. I purchased a small condo in the city with some of the money I put away in #1. Just sold it recently (20 years after purchasing it; lived in it for 5 years, rented it out for a profit for 15 years). I made a lot of money off that sale. More money than I’ve ever seen at once.

3. My spouse and I have always lived below our means. Now we’re not frugal - we go out for nice dinners, travel, have kids. We also have good jobs. But, when we purchased a house we could have afforded to get one that was $600k and instead opted for a smaller townhome in a nice neighborhood for almost half the price. Living this way has paid off more than I could have ever imagined. Both of us don’t have to work. We travel whenever we want. We could technically both stop working in our 40s/50s and probably be fine. It’s a feeling of freedom. We’ve never over-extended ourselves. When our colleagues and friends were buying expensive homes and expensive cars and extending themselves, we just didn’t do that.

Vasectomy like 10 years ago. Kids are expensive.

Buying a house. Got lucky and bought before the pandemic, and even then just barely scraped together a downpayment by borrowing from inlaws.

It’s crazy how having a mortgage have us access to so much cheap credit. We were able to pay off all consumer debt and even most of our student loan debt. Even with all our debt bundled in the mortgage we’re still paying far less than we would to rent an apartment.

It’s nuts

Living like a pauper for a few years and paying the mortgage off early.

Also not joining the rat race, and buying new shiny shit for the sake of it.

Making a budget and sticking to it every month. I am able to save 17% of what i make and put it into Monero to avoid it getting eaten by inflation.

Getting an industry job rather than a postdoc after I finished my PhD.

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Dave Ramsey financial planning/yellow envelope method.

Most of the things mentioned in this thread are mostly dumb luck and not necessarily active financial decisions.

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1. No kids
   2 Studying