Across X (formerly Twitter) are grifters galore pumping stocks and meme coins—even the site’s owner does it. Tiktok is full of day traders and entrepreneurs claiming to make heaps of cash on a monthly basis, and you can too—just listen to their advice, buy their courses, and get rich.
At least r/wallstreetbets is forthcoming when it comes to treating the stock market as a casino. “Loss porn” (screenshots of people losing money) is by far the best way to collect upvotes. It’s a strange world when people cope with losing their inheritance by posting on Reddit to hoard made-up internet points.
I’m as guilty as anyone when it comes to taking financial advice from strangers, and I have a bad habit of not doing my due diligence when investing. It’s easy to repeat the mantra “just buy indexes”, but it’s tough to fight the FOMO when you see peers your age (often younger!) buying real estate and nice cars off profits gained from crypto and NVIDIA. It’s a pervasive belief that if you’re not beating the market, you’re losing.
That being said, I think we can find a middle ground in 2025. It’s called investing how you spend.1
Not to toot my own horn, but I’m an excellent shopper. I’m much better at shopping than investing. Most people are. Getting the best bang for buck is something that’s ingrained in us. As kids we all faced the same dilemma: which toy will bring us maximum joy for the least amount of money? We’ve been conditioned since childhood to seek out value, weigh the options, and buy according to our preferences, needs, and wants.
When it comes to investing how you spend I’m not talking about when you impulse buy an $8 bubble tea (guilty! 😑). I’m talking about when you choose to spend your hard-earned cash, you’re whittling down the infinite number of ways you could spend that money and you’re buying what you want and what you need. And if you want and need it, there’s a good chance other people feel the same way.
Do you own a lot of Apple products? Will your next phone be an iPhone? You should probably buy APPL. Have you owned a Netflix subscription for years? What about Amazon Prime? Maybe you pay Google $3/month for cloud storage. Whatever it is, you probably buy it for a reason. Put your money where your mouth is and invest how you spend.
This is not financial advice.
Footnotes
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Inversely, “don’t invest how you don’t spend”. I haven’t seen a Disney movie in theatre since 2018, yet I bought stock in 2021 at $200 USD. I will not be buying more DIS any time soon. ↩