1. Read the reddit personal finance wiki https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/index/
2. Read The Simple Path to Wealth by J L Collins
3. Read The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing
4. Read the Bogleheads' wiki https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Main_Page
5. Use a personal finance app to track budget and spending (I use Simplifi).
6. Track your Income, Expenses (just the broad category), Bills (per invoice), Assets, Debt on a spreadsheet with columns per month. I make it easy and put the hyperlink for the source of truth in the name of the row.
7. My general rule is that I need to have at least 50% savings each month from combined investments and income. This percentage is more defined by what year you want to "retire" and switch from capital accumulation to capital spending phases of your life.
8. This is the step I'm on now. I'm trying to learn finance in a far deeper capacity, so I'm spending time to learn accounting, finance, trading strategies. I'll run various accounts with different strategies and see how it goes. Those strategies will fall under the "speculative" part of my portfolio, which won't exceed more than I can afford to lose and still hit my retirement targets.
You may have to adjust it slightly if you can’t buy Vanguard directly, and should probably have more domestic exposure to whatever economy you’ll be participating in most throughout your life, but the basics really are pretty simple.
Anytime someone tries to make it seem more complex, assume they’re reaching for a slice of your pie. You’ll be right way more than not.
1. If your company has a 401(k) retirement account match it's worth using the program, match = free money. They often have target-date retirement funds, just do 100% to those. Otherwise an S&P500 index fund. This isn't likely for part-time work but worth remembering for the future. Also probably not called a 401(k) outside of the US, but if you ask the HR person at your job they'll likely know what I'm talking about.
2. Save up six months of expenses in a savings account. Check around for the highest interest rate you can find. When you've done that, calculate what local market rent is, pretend you had to pay that, and save six months of expenses with that amount.
3. Open up an account at a low-fee brokerage. Ally, TD Ameritrade, etrade...it doesn't really matter just check out their websites and pick the one which you like the best.
4. With any extra money, dollar cost average into a broad market index fund (SPY, VEU, VTI are all popular choices). People will probably weigh in on which one is best, honestly the broad market funds are all correlated >0.95, just pick the one with the lowest fees. DCA: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dollarcostaveraging.asp. It's best if you can set this up automatically somehow.
5. Generally speaking, any money you put into the stock market you should avoid touching for at least 5 years. Which is why I harped on the 6-months savings above. Also the people that do best in the stock market are often people that check their accounts the least often. Buy-and-hold ftw. Which is why I mentioned making the DCA plan automatic.
6. If you feel like taking some risk (individual stocks, options, crypto), it's best to have a separate account for that stuff and it shouldn't be more than 10% of your main account.
Start by going to vanguard.com and opening a brokerage account. Use the website to set up automatic investments into VTSAX.
Then you can investigate @robcohen’s advice at your leisure. The important thing is to just get started.
(I’m not sure if you can use Vanguard from Europe. It’s a good place to start, at any rate.)
Your spending may be very simple and limited now, but moving out, getting married, having dependents, becoming a homeowner and so on will vastly complicate it. It's useful and comforting to have some history on file to see if you are going "in the right direction", whatever that is for you.
There are any number of software programs out there, both commercial and free, to help, whether gnucash, Quickbooks, YNAB, or others that have been discussed on HN over time.
That's the simplest and best answer you can find.
If you can put together a rough plan for the budget for that, you might cap your liquid savings at 6-12 months of ongoing expenses plus an estimate of your one time expenses. After that, responsible long term investments. Of course, it's not a bad idea to put some amount into long term responsible investing now.
Not knowing what country you're in makes it hard to recommend specifics. For your short term savings, you want something safe (government guaranteed if you live in a stable economy) but shop around to different banks and see if any give better interest than others. For your long term savings, you want some sort of brokerage and investing in a broad index fund of some sort; if you have access to Vanguard funds in a tax appropriate way, their index funds are more or less the benchmark for low cost index funds. Depending on your local tax laws, it may be better to have a locally domiciled fund, or an Ireland or a US domiciled fund. Ideally, you're able to use a brokerage that is low cost, but established. The US benchmark is zero fees for the brokerage account and near zero fees for trading ETFs, and a broad stock index expense ratio should be around 0.1% or less. That's not available in all countries, but look around and see. There's also plenty of US options with more fees and bigger expense ratios, but IMHO, those expenses don't get you anything worthwhile.
I also live in Europe. Here some quick suggestions from person who is quite interested in trading and investing:
1. Save few months of cash reserves to have freedom if things goes south.
2. Start reading about investing and ETFs and Indexes.
3. Start invest in small sums in ETFs and or Bonds. There are two ways:
3.1. If you want to transfer and forget, you can try some of the RoboAdvisors, which will buy ETFs/Bonds for you with assigned percentage. I personally use ETFMatic [1] for couple of years without any issues.
3.2. If you want to buy ETFs by yourself, you can open brokerage account. As I read that you are from Europe, we mostly use Degiro [2] or IBKR [3] here. I use IBKR personally. You will be safer with ETFs, rather than single stocks. One of the recommended ETFs, would be VWCE, which Tin short - tracks World economy. As my colleagues say, VWCE and Chill.
5. Happy and safe investing!
You can find more information about European ETFs on justetf.com [4]
Do some projections based on that risk and how long you plan to grow your money. Then build the habits and automate your investing to the point where you forget about your money while it grows.
If you have no idea what to do today, save it until you educate yourself enough to know what to do with it tomorrow.
Depending on your risk appetite, you may want to consider index funds from Vanguard (very low fee) or government bonds (low yield, consider this if you're extremely risk averse).
Start buying some stuff. Yes, investing is good and savings are important. But at some point, you’re saving so you can have money to spend. So figure out what you enjoy spending your money on. Do you like things or experiences? Spend some money on a nice meal. Buy nice clothes.
People who are overly obsessed with saving money are very unpleasant to be around.
End of story.
1. Contribute whatever you need to contribute to your local pension.
2. Save the rest of your money.
3. Deploy your money when needed by either investing it in yourself(health, skills, whatever else) or into an area where you have an edge(so computers). At worst, if you have some idea for a startup later in your life you can use this as startup capital.
My general advice in this regard: Passive "income" for people under 25 is a pure financial trap. You need to be making active "income" and saving otherwise. All your money you earn right now should ideally be spent on developing and honing whatever edge you have in the area that interests you. And it obviously isn't the financial markets.