| Much good advice has been given here. You should consider it all. I am here to offer another approach for consideration. My perspective is from working in Silicon Valley in the US most of my career. During my 20+ years in this field I have seen when - IBM was declared "dead" before Gerstner came in, and it's capitalization was below the value of the real estate it held. It's hard to imagine now. - Apple dropped to almost nothing in stock price, and Jobs was pushed out by Sculley. - Cisco became a real company. - Netflix came on the scene. - Amazon came on the scene. - Facebook IPO'd way too low. (I know someone who piled in, and bought a Tesla 6 months later). 2 of those opportunities, because I understand this industry, I recognized and took advantage of by buying the stocks. Others I did not even see. I lost a little money alot, but made alot of money a few times. The key is never to bet too much on the same company, so you can win if you are right only 20% of the time. Today I am following the economic shift from the U.S. and companies that are capitalizing on the rapid maturation of machine learning. I've also taken a job at a machine learning startup where I negotiated harder for equity than pay. Don't even get me started on blockchain. I did not make free bitcoin early on, and sometimes still berate myself. But banks and governments will increasingly regulate cryptocurrency, taking away the liberty it brings while reaping the benefits of more efficient operations. Those are trends I can safely invest in. Look at hyperledger, JPM coin, Ripple, that sort of thing. (As an aside, every 5 years in technology has been "the most exciting time ever to be alive". We are lucky to be around at this point in history, and in the countries we are in.) My theory has been: you can see what your industry is doing to the world. Place your bets. Ride the ups and downs for a few years (3 to 10 -- Netflix took along time to become obvious; so did Amazon). Reap unreasonable profit. To summarize, the biggest dollar per hour wins in my life have been investments, not income. Being higher in the hierarchy has only increased this trend. Make sure you think about this avenue as well. (For another example, during the dot com boom I saw a co-worker use naked calls to turn USD $20,000 into millions. But they were naked calls -- he lost it all when the market crashed, less than 6 months from his planned retirement. That level of risk is not for me.) |