📓 Blog Post 22 – “Investing 101 (For People Who Still Think Savings Means ‘Under the Pillow’)”
📓 Blog Post – “Investing 101 (For People Who Still Think Savings Means ‘Under the Pillow’)”
✍️ By Chaos Samuel
So let’s talk about investing — that mystical adult word people throw around while sipping coffee and pretending they understand finance. ☕📉
This isn’t a get-rich-quick post. I’m not about to tell you to buy six NFTs and a goat farm in Bali. This is just so when money does come your way, you’re not standing there like: “What now?” 💀
Because, let’s be honest, half of us say “we’ll figure it out when we’re rich,” but when that paycheck hits, the only thing we “figure out” is how fast it can disappear on takeout, sneakers and random payments that often stems from ego.💸👟
💰 Step 1: Learn What “Investing” Actually Means
Investing isn’t gambling.
It’s not “let me YOLO all my rent into Bitcoin and pray.” 🙏💀
It’s putting your money somewhere it can grow — slowly, safely, ideally without giving you a heart attack every morning.
Stocks, bonds, funds, real estate, even your own business — all of it’s investing if you understand what you’re doing. 🧠
And as Mary Callahan Erdoes once explained perfectly:
“Most people make great sums of money by doing one thing really well.
And when they master that one thing really well — like running the largest and most successful private equity firm in the world — nobody can beat them at it.
That’s how they make their money. But to keep that money and continue to grow it, the trick is diversification.
Diversification comes with having to master lots of different things, and generally, people find that hard to do — because they don’t have the time to do it.”
Basically — master one thing, build your wealth from it, then learn how to protect it through diversification.
One skill creates wealth. Many skills keep it.
🪙 Step 2: Chill with the Crypto Obsession
Dude… crypto is cool and all, but it’s also chaos with a logo. 🌀
If you can’t afford to lose it, don’t touch it.
Because at some point — and I mean this with love — you will lose it. 💀
It’s high-risk, high-drama investing.
Focus on the stable stuff first: your savings, your income streams, and your emergency funds.
Once those are sorted, then maybe buy a little Bitcoin, Ethereum, or a few other notable coins. 🪙✨
And if you’re feeling brave? Sure, sprinkle in a few “lost coins” — the ones nobody talks about but might moon.
Just spread the risk like peanut butter, evenly and calmly. 🥜📉
Crypto’s not bad — just not a babysitter for your bank account.
📈 Step 3: Before You Invest — Build a Safety Net
If you have £0 to £5000 in emergency savings, don’t touch the stock market yet.
You can’t “diversify your portfolio” with that little 🍞.
Start simple:
Save 3–6 months’ expenses.
Pay off high-interest debt (credit cards are the devils in a suit). 🕴️💳
Learn to live on less than you earn.
Once that’s solid — then you can start thinking about making your money multiply.
And if you’re thinking of trading — first of all, relax. 😮💨
Only do that if you can afford to lose. Because one day, you will. 💀📉
And let’s be honest — trading is just gambling 2.0 with a graph attached.
You’re basically staring at candlesticks and convincing yourself you see “patterns,” while the actual top dogs are working with data you don’t have access to. 🕵️♂️💻
As to how they get it? Either through legal means and connections or illegal means. E.g insider trading.
Never go down that route if you value your peace.
The hard truth? A company can lose value the same way it gains it. Stocks don’t care about your optimism or your rent due date. 📊😬
Unless you plan on getting insider info (which, just to be clear, is a federal crime ⚖️), your odds aren’t as good as you think.
So unless you’re some kind of stock god or a time regressor, respectfully, sit down. 📉
So here’s the real play:
Trade only when you can afford to lose it. Not as your main hustle, not as your day-to-day job — because unless you’re built for stress, and are one of the top dogs in trading who easily earn hundreds of thousands a month with experiences stacked like the great wall of china , you’ll just end up arguing with your monitor like it owes you money. 🖥️💢
Trading can pay, sure. But it’s risky — and risk should be managed, not worshipped.
Investing is supposed to protect your peace, not raise your blood pressure. 🧘♂️📈
Plus if trading feels like you’re playing emotional dodgeball with your own bank account, let me introduce you to something calmer: ETFs. 😌
ETF stands for Exchange-Traded Fund — which sounds fancy, but really it’s just a giant shopping basket of different investments. 🧺
Instead of buying one company’s stock and hoping it behaves, you buy tiny pieces of a lot of them at once. It’s like getting the sampler platter instead of betting everything on one spicy wing. 🍗📉
You’re basically buying little slivers of hundreds of businesses — tech, energy, real estate, maybe a few weird ones that sell pineapples and car parts.
So when one stock tanks, another might save the day. It balances out. ⚖️
If you’re fine with annual dividend returns between 1% and 10%, depending on what you buy (and whether the market feels generous that year 🫶📈), ETFs are your peaceful middle ground.
You won’t get rich overnight — but you’ll sleep fine, your money grows, and you don’t have to stare at charts like they owe you money. 💤💼
Think of it like this:
Trading = gambling with flair. 🎰
ETFs = slow cooking wealth on low heat. 🍲
💼 Step 4: The Most Underrated Investment — You
Before you buy stocks, buy skills.
Read. Learn. Build.
Because if you don’t know what to do with £1000, you’ll lose £10,000 the same way — just with better lighting. 💡
Courses, books, mentors, even trial and error — all count.
A sharp mind compounds faster than any index fund. ⚡
📊 The Bigger Picture — The Financial Evolution from Survival to Control
And here’s the bigger picture — in this world, let’s be honest: money is power.
Not the only kind, but the one most people can actually touch.
Investing? That’s somewhere around the fourth level of power.
Here’s how the climb really stacks up, at least from my perspective — the quiet evolution from survival to control:
1️⃣ Self-Employed:
You are the business. You trade time for money.
Stop working, income stops. Freedom is limited, but control is personal. 💼⌛
💸 Annual pull: £20k – £150k
(Direct income. Time-bound. High effort, low leverage.)
2️⃣ Entrepreneur:
You start a business — maybe small teams, maybe big dreams — still in the trenches, still hands-on. 🏗️🔥
💸 Annual pull: £50k – £500k
(Revenue-driven. Profit fluctuates. Risk still personal.)
3️⃣ Company:
A proper structure with real, tangible assets, people, and systems — existing beyond any one person.
From a single office to billboards advertising your name. 🏢🌆
💸 Annual pull: £500k – £10M+
(Net profit plus retained earnings. Valuation begins to matter.)
4️⃣ Business Owner:
The system runs without you. Your time buys growth instead of survival.
You create jobs, not just work. 👥📈
💸 Annual pull: £1M – £50M
(Owner distributions. Cash flow optional, control mandatory.)
5️⃣ Investor:
Your money now works harder than you ever did.
You buy equity, not hours. You play with percentages and probabilities, not paychecks. 💰⚡
💸 Annual pull: £50M – £100M+
(Mostly unrealised gains. Liquidity by design, not necessity.)
6️⃣ Conglomerate:
Multiple industries, one center of gravity.
Control spreads like roots — banking, real estate, media, tech — all orbiting a single core, mostly in a country. 🌐🌳
💸 Annual pull: £100M – £1B+
(Internal capital movement outweighs external profit reporting.)
7️⃣ Multinational:
You cross borders. Influence moves through currencies, economies, and governments.
Your name echoes in other languages. ✈️💱
💸 Annual pull: £500M – £5B+
(Multi-currency flow. Tax efficiency and scale dominate strategy.)
8️⃣ Corporation:
The game changes. You operate across industries; scale becomes routine.
Even the law begins to bend around your boardroom — legally, through regulatory frameworks, compliance standards, tax structures, and policies shaped with enterprises of your scale in mind. 🏦📊
💸 Annual pull: £5B – £20B+
(Structured earnings. Regulation adapts to accommodate scale.)
9️⃣ Financial Empire:
Silent kings. No headlines. No fame. 👑💨
Their influence shapes markets — some fund wars, others rebuild nations.
They move money like wind.
💸 Annual pull: £20B – £300B+
(Not income as people understand it. Capital flow.)
This is where corporate nations without borders emerge.
At this stage, the GDPs of several countries are no longer on par with them —
not metaphorically, but numerically.
No borders. No flags. No elections.
Just balance sheets, supply chains, capital routing, and legal gravity.
At this stage, money stops being something you hold — it becomes something you move.
It’s not even about profit anymore. It’s about leverage — the quiet kind.
You’ll never see them online arguing about wealth or flexing assets.
They don’t chase legacy — they structure it.
Some build. Some destroy. Both without explanation.
Power like this doesn’t roar.
It rearranges reality.
And among those who study, speculate, or sense it — a few remain neutral.
Not out of fear, but because neutrality probably stems from wisdom.
They understand it’s no longer about money —
it’s about liquidity in motion, asset control, and protected silence.
At Tier 9, admiration and judgment both lose meaning.
There’s nothing to praise, nothing to hate — only to understand, quietly.
Some climb the ladder.
Some step away from it.
Both choices are valid. ⚖️
🔟 Supranational:
Institutions perceived to sit above nations.
Beyond borders. Beyond politics. Beyond elections.
“Shadow governments”? Not quite.
More accurately, this tier represents the 0.001% of society in terms of wealth and structural influence.
Not rulers in the traditional sense, but forces that move nations like chess pieces through the pull of financial gravity. ♟️🌍
💸 Annual pull: Effectively unbounded
(Money becomes incidental. Control is the constant.)
Governments don’t report to them. They adapt to them.
sometimes unknowingly, sometimes fully aware.
At this point, their scale rivals the GDP of the top dog nations.
In certain domains, it quietly surpasses it.
They don’t govern through force.
They govern through dependency.
Debt. Trade. Energy. Data. Logistics. Capital access.
A government without liquidity collapses faster than one without an army.
And according to my generation’s slang, they’re called the men in suits —
the ones you never see working overtly, yet whose moves ripple through the entire system. 🕴️♟️
Beyond this Scale ?
As for what lies beyond Supranational… who knows?
We don’t talk about Bruno, remember? 😎💭
Maybe myths. Maybe meetings with no minutes.
If real — their currency isn’t cash. It’s control.
And control is its own kind of currency.
It’s a loop — and eventually, money becomes obsolete to them,
because it no longer works for them.
It simply works.
💭 Quick Question (Before We Move On)
what tier are you aiming for? 👀
Not where you are now.
Where you want to land.
Your Answer?
As for me? Not saying 😌✨
I will leave that to your imagination 💭
Nothing crazy though.
Alright — enough existential ladder climbing.
🏠 Step 5: Real Estate (For the Ambitious Ones)
Now let’s be real — real estate sounds sexy until you’re the one fixing a leaky sink at midnight or chasing unpaid rent like you’re in an action movie. 🧱💦
If you’re not ready to handle people not paying rent, don’t start there.
Here’s an example: let’s say you rent out 100 houses. Out of those, a few tenants can’t pay. You give them a one-month grace period, but they still can’t pay — now you’re faced with the cold truth: you’ll have to evict them.
Not because you’re heartless, but because it’s business.
You both lose. They lose the home. You lose the income.
And let’s be honest — some of you probably won’t even have it in you to give that one month grace period. 💭
And even worse, some of you go and build personal relationships with tenants. 😭
Bro, no. Because when eviction time comes — even if it’s not personal — you’ll ruin that relationship instantly. You’ll be the villain in their story, no matter how kind your tone was.
So have systems in place to absorb the emotional recoil. 💼
Let someone else handle the paperwork, the calls, the “we need to talk” moments.
If they call you crying, say: “It’s protocol, I’m sorry.”
If you really care, maybe cover a week or two at a hotel — but don’t mix empathy with rent collection.
You’ll break your peace and your portfolio. 🧊🏠
If you’re new, maybe start with REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts).
You get to invest in property without managing tenants, repairs, or awkward eviction notices.
Think of it as owning real estate while still sleeping peacefully. 😴🏢
🪙 Step 6: If You Hate Stress — Let Banks Handle It
Still, all this stuff can be stressful. Charts, numbers, decisions — it’s a lot. 😮💨
So if you’d rather skip the headache, just head to your nearest bank or brokerage.
They’ll invest on your behalf, help manage portfolios, and make sure you don’t blow your entire savings on Dogecoin. 🏦📊
You won’t get the same thrill, but you’ll sleep better — and sleep, my friends, is an underrated dividend. 💤
💳 Step 7: Spend Smart, Not Loud
Here’s a rule that’ll save your wallet and your sanity:
If you can’t afford to buy it twice, you can’t afford to buy it once. 💸
When you reach that point where you can — fine, buy the car you’ve been eyeing. 🚗
Grab that Hermès bag if you’re a lady who worked for it. 👜
Or whatever your “I made it” item looks like. Just do it responsibly.
Luxury isn’t evil. Recklessness is.
Flex quietly, invest loudly. 🕶️
🧠 Step 8: Control Your Emotions
The market goes up and down.
That’s not God punishing you; that’s just how the market works. 📉📈
Don’t panic sell. Don’t FOMO buy.
If your emotions control your money, you’ll be broke and stressed.
And trust me, that’s a combo meal nobody wants. 😭🍟
💬 Step 9: Don’t Flex, Build
When you finally start earning and investing, don’t turn into “that guy” who buys a car the moment his net worth hits five or six digits. 🚗💨
The goal isn’t to look rich — it’s to stay rich.
Because wealth whispers. Debt yells. 💀
So yeah, that’s your mini survival guide.
Not financial advice, just common sense with memes attached.
Money doesn’t change you — it just exposes whether you were disciplined or delusional.
Learn now, so when it comes, you’re ready. 💼🔥
Still, this is just a guide.
What you do with it? That’s on you. 😌
Besides, who am I to give you advice?
Take it or leave it — I haven’t even made much of myself yet.
Still, I will — undoubtedly. 💫
and that’s not arrogance. It’s just me being stubbornly certain.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go boil some rice.
My ears are practically ringing at this point.
Mom, I hear you — I’m practically her personal chef at this point , so I guess I’m making chicken stew as well. 🍚🍗😮💨
Chaos Samuel
🕯️ Writing without permission. 🌙 Living without labels.
