I was 18 years old when I first saw Being There.

I was encouraged to watch it by someone with culture and taste.

Decades later, it’s still one of the best movies I’ve seen.

If you’re in a hurry today, stop here, but do make time to watch Peter Sellers play Chance the gardener.

Now, if you’re going to stick around for a while, what follows is for the young person in your life looking for solid ground underneath their feet while making their very first “adult” financial decisions—and for you to pass it along to them.

I recently spoke to a group of roughly forty (very impressive and driven) 20-somethings.

The topic: “What I wish I knew in my 20s.”

We’ve established that I knew what a great movie Being There was by the time I was 20.

Other than that, I knew approximately NOTHING.

I had, however, taken a huge risk—getting on a plane to Los Angeles on my own and without much of a plan—a few years prior and had “gotten away with it.”

I was physically safe despite having come dangerously close to being a Hollywood runaway, and I had just gotten into UCLA as a transfer student. I think that’s what we used to call the American Dream. I lived it. It was very special.

In fairness, the group wanted more tangible “financial insights” from me, not just vague encouragements to take chances and hope the world catches you mid-fall.

Here it goes…

Things related to money I wish I had known then.

Know where your money goes.

Every money decision gets easier after that: each expense will either feel like the best use of your limited resources or it won’t. (Bonus insight: everyone’s resources are limited, however wealthy you are. Those who don’t believe it learn the hard way.)

And you will have clarity on what can go if and when you need to get righteous. For example, those taxi rides you pay for your burrito deliveries. That’s the start of informed budgeting.

Before you stress out about how much money to save and how much to invest, understand that math applies here as it does everywhere in the universe.

As Zvi Bodie put it years ago, saving and investing are the same thing, and both equal income minus spending.

A deluge of insights comes from that simple understanding.

Early on in life, most of us are reasonably endowed with human capital (our ability to earn a living) while terribly under-staked with financial capital (money).

Stressing out about what to do with the couple of bucks left over at the end of the month (if you’re lucky) is the wrong focus.

Maximize your ability to earn money, whether that’s acquiring skills, earning credentials, or connecting with people. Doing anything geared toward growing your ability to earn money sustainably over time is a win relative to obsessing over your Robinhood account.

In econ-professor-speak, the punchline is that you should look at your “total balance sheet.”

You have loads of liabilities (things that will require you to spend money, now and later) and two types of assets: financial capital and human capital. Like all balance sheets, the left side must equal the right side; there is no trapdoor here.

If you want to spend more, focus on growing the asset that’s most under your control.

Wait, it gets better.

The economic model tells us that the whole point of saving and investing is to achieve something called “consumption smoothing.”

Humans tend to want to consume steadily, not gorge on riches one year and look under the couch cushions for spare change the next, or vice versa.

As a result, if you can reasonably expect to earn more money in a year or two (like if you’re finishing med school), it’s not unreasonable to “borrow against future earnings” and start enjoying life today.

The word “reasonably” is critical here.

If you’re kidding yourself about your prospects, consuming more today only to find out that there is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow will make a bad situation worse.

But say you knew for sure. Here are three highly stylized ways to make ten million dollars over a lifetime:

The simplest economic model (no taxes, zero interest, unconstrained borrowing—i.e., not the real world) says it doesn’t matter how the money comes in; you would want to consume the same every year. And that’s what would drive savings decisions, not the other way around.

Of course, you don’t know anything for sure. That’s a big reason why we save.

We don’t just save to “smooth consumption.”

We save to have the means to get through bad events.

So yes, it’s a good idea to have enough cash stashed away to handle living your life for a few months, even if you lose your job.

And that cash probably shouldn’t be in risky assets.

Why? Because if you lose your job in the middle of a financial crisis, you’ll quickly learn the meaning of the term “Texas hedge” (a misconceived hedge that actually doubles your exposure).

But imagine something bad happens—and it almost surely will, at some point—and you’re able to muddle your way through to the other end without needing to fall back on someone else. How great would that feel?

You know what they call that? True independence.

There are no half measures here.

Either you’re independent or you’re not.

And when you are, congratulations—you’ve reached the next level in the video game: bona fide adulthood.

It’s pretty great when you get it right.

Loads of people have done it before.

You can too.

We actually covered a lot more than this when we got together, including:

Anyone can download the full slide deck (for free, obviously): What I Wish I Knew In My 20s

I hope you’ll share it with that young adult in your life who’s trying to figure it out.

For more on this topic, you may also want to read A Young Person’s Guide to Making Life Decisions (March 2025).

Here are a couple of things more immediately related to the economy and markets.

First, my conversation with Chuck Jaffe on his podcast “Money Life with Chuck Jaffe” last week. We covered several topics, all in just about 20 minutes, capturing a decent amount of my thinking at this point.

→ We talked about why the market has been mostly ignoring the ongoing barrage of global bad news so far.

→ We talked about whether a “credit event” would be necessary to turn market sentiment darker, and what an AI shock to labor markets could look like.

→ And we talked about how to stress-test your portfolio and compare that uncertainty to the closest thing we have to a risk-free real asset (Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities, or TIPS).

The episode “Read the news, but watch the earnings” came out Wednesday, September 16, and you can find it by searching for Chuck’s show on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and all the usual places.

It’s also linked on treussard.com, if that makes things easier.

Speaking of TIPS, Jason Zweig at The Wall Street Journal recently wrote a column about these inflation-protected bonds issued by the U.S. Treasury. Here is what I contributed to the conversation: