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    By life stage ยท 10 tips

    Your first job

    The first years of working: build an emergency fund, handle your money, and form a few habits that are hard to change later.

    1 Money

    Don't waste your money

    Build an emergency fund of 3 to 6 months of living expenses first, and keep it where you can withdraw it at any time

    Keep 3 to 6 months of living expenses in a place you can take it out at any time. Then when you lose your job or get sick, you don't have to borrow at high interest, such as by making only the minimum credit card payment, and you don't have to sell your investments at a loss. Money in a bank is covered by deposit insurance, up to 500,000 (50ไธ‡) CNY at the same bank.

    • High value
    • Evidence C
    • Saves money
    What not to buy

    Don't skip saving just because โ€œpeople can die at any time, so it's happier to spend the money earlyโ€; about 90% of 30-year-olds live to 60

    By the World Health Organization's figures for China, about 92% of 30-year-olds live to 60, and more than half live to 80. Young people commonly overestimate their chance of dying early, and living by that feeling leaves them with about a quarter less saved than they should have. Working from these figures, most people need to save for living to old age.

    • Moderate value
    • Evidence B
    • Saves money
    Don't waste your money

    Turn off all auto-renewals and renew by hand when a subscription expires

    What you save is the subscriptions you stopped using long ago but that still charge you every month. Going through the auto-debit lists in Alipay, WeChat, Apple and Android takes less than 20 minutes. By regulation, a merchant must give you a clear reminder before charging you, and must also give you a way to cancel at any time that is easy to find and easy to use.

    • High value
    • Evidence C
    • Saves money
    Don't waste your money

    Use broad index funds instead of actively managed funds as the long-term core holding (the part of your money you hold for the long run)

    The stocks that actively managed funds hold, taken together, are already very close to the whole market. But the extra management fee they charge is taken straight out of the return you end up with. When fund results are compared by repeatedly recalculating them as if they were luck, very few funds earn enough extra to make up for the fees they charge.

    • High value
    • Evidence B
    • Saves money
    • Disputed
    Don't waste your money

    Among similar funds, prefer the one with lower fees

    For every 1 percentage point higher in the yearly fee rate, you end up with about 18% less after 20 years and about 26% less after 30 years. Picking the lower-fee fund within the same category means less is eaten up by fees.

    • Top value
    • Evidence C
    • Saves money
    Don't waste your money

    Don't make only the minimum credit card payment, and don't take installments or consumer loans for purchases; if you must borrow, convert the interest into an annualized rate before comparing

    The minimum payment is a loan with interest charged by the day, about 18% a year at the cap that applied before 2020, and it voids the interest-free period. An installment advertised as "0.6% fee per month" is about 13.8% a year, not 7.2%. That is because you repay principal every month while the fee keeps being charged on the original amount. To tell which loan costs more, look only at the annualized rate, not the daily rate or the monthly fee rate.

    • Moderate value
    • Evidence C
    • Saves money

    2 Housing

    3 Body

    Don't die slowly

    Quit smoking, and the earlier the better

    On average, people who smoke live more than 10 years less than people who don't. Quitting before 40 wipes out about 90% of the added risk of death from continuing to smoke. The earlier you quit, the more you get back. If you keep smoking after a broken bone, the odds that the bone fails to heal are about 2.3 times those of a non-smoker, so don't smoke until the bone has healed.

    • High value
    • Evidence A
    • Buys life
    Don't die slowly

    Sleep about 7 hours a night on a regular schedule

    People who regularly sleep less than 7 hours have about a 10% higher chance of dying over the same period. The more irregular the schedule, the higher the risk. Everyone else has a 20% to nearly 50% lower risk than the most irregular group. How regular your schedule is tells you more about the risk of death than how long you sleep.

    • Moderate value
    • Evidence A
    • Buys life
    Don't die early

    Check your blood pressure, and if it's high, take medicine to get it down to target

    For every 10 mmHg drop in blood pressure, the chance of a major cardiovascular event falls by about 20%, stroke by 27%, heart failure by 28% and death by 13%. Among Chinese people aged 35 to 75, 44.7% have high blood pressure, and only 7.2% have it under control.

    • High value
    • Evidence A
    • Buys life

    Related

    This site arranged the groups and order on this page; the tips come from the book. About