I am not a financial advisor, but to chime in on what some people have said…

Don’t take risks with money you can’t afford to lose: yes, that!

Naturally the real value of all our cash is slowly going down all the time due to inflation, so we have to find a useful place to put it, once the necessities of life are taken care of.

Have the rainy day fund, and dip in to it *only* on rainy days. It’s amazing how expensive life can get when you have no money.

So, I think it’s not controversial to say *always* keep an eye paying your debts down. Debt is useful to funnel wealth from an presumed shining future, but no-one is going to live forever, and no-one is immune to bad luck. Some practical good news as the interest rate on the capital is typically larger than the base rate and this makes reducing debt a smallish double win through reducing payments faster than gains from saving.

By the way “saving” — ha! — anyone remember that?

That said, there are some stock market instruments that are the “boring dependable boyfriend" type, that deliver good year on year returns that are worth putting your cash into, but I would caution *only* after you’ve taken care of the necessities.

About me:

I started working for financial companies some years, and was a little bit torn at the time.

But we have to remember for very many, everything they do is legal and regulated, and the numbers add up correctly. The payday loan sharks and day trading platforms are the unacceptable face of fintech.

I personally don’t sell bombs or cigarettes, push opioids or raise the cost of insulin drugs by orders of magnitude.

One real problem I see is the moral hazard that comes with being so comfortable is that there is almost no consequence to wild spending, and no incentive to think about the problem of not having enough.

This holds for the 2-5% as well, I talk to these people and they spend money like it’s going out of fashion, being royally fleeced in the process by the way, and they see no problems. Until the redundancy and then they have no Plan B. They’re not the super-rich, they don’t create the inequality, and their class has not been immunised to becoming part of the precariat. However they have inoculated themself against looking at the problems of the 95%, and — until they’re thrown on the scrapheap — their views are highly influential…