What personal finance advice can one of the richest men in the world give? Oddly enough, in the case of Bill Gates, many of his tips are focused on trying and protecting yourself from potential complications.
throughout his career as Entrepreneur, philanthropist, and businessman, Bill Gates has faced many challenges, He has talked about them in various interviews, and here we review several of those tips:]
“Always underestimate the change that will happen in the next two years and we underestimate the change that will happen in the next 10 yearsGates once said.
There is a need to keep an eye on what will happen in a few years to invest the money and work towards achieving your goals. It is important to avoid what you call short-sighted decisions when it comes to investing, and to think better in the long term.
For Gates, there is no money better spent on training and education. Gates dropped out of college, yes, but in a Reddit thread he participated in in 2014, someone asked him: “What is your best personal financial advice for people who make less than $100,000 a year? His answer: “Invest in your education.”
In a Harvard commencement speech in (late) 2007, Gates reflected on his time at the school. “What I remember most about Harvard was beingamidf so much energy and intelligence. It could be exhilarating, intimidating, sometimes challenging, but it was always challenging. It was an incredible privilege, and even though I left early, I changed my years at Harvard, the friendships I made, and the ideas I worked on,” he said then.
Gates states that he had a habit from a young age that he applied to both his personal and professional life: he wanted his standard of living and his business expenses to be insured for 12 months, with that money available, so if He invested it, he did it, in mechanisms that would allow him to keep it forever.
On several occasions, he has assured me that he thinks that sometimes he is being careful, but that he feels safe that way.
He says he was concerned about not having that emergency fund, both personally and at his companies. “I always had to be careful that we didn’t hire too many people,” he said in a 2017 television interview. “I always worried because the people who worked for me were older than me and had kids, and I always thought, ‘What if we don’t get paid? Will I be able to make payroll? My goal has always been to stay out of trouble. Earlier.”
And the last one is also aimed at thinking in the long term. Gates believes that in finance, you must be balanced and not favor either being optimistic or pessimistic, but rather combine both these outlooks to your advantage. Gates believes that, in finance, optimists can only survive in the long term if they are sufficiently pessimistic in the short term.
According to Gates, “Saving like a pessimist and investing like an optimist is the best approach for most people”, Gates believes that saving like a pessimist is a way to ensure that a financial cushion is always available. Furthermore, Gates recommends investing with optimism once funds are secured, something he learned from his friend Warren Buffett.
Lastly, Gates always advises that investing in education and training is the best use of money. In a 2014 Reddit question and answer session, a user asked him, “What’s your best financial advice for people who make less than $100,000 a year?” His answer was “Invest in your training”.
