I legitimately never got a single piece of useful financial advice from anyone, I had to learn everything on my own via books and podcasts and it was only after getting into bitcoin.

In my mid-20s I had a decent-paying job in Moscow and was desperate to learn so I asked the richest guy I knew (an expat who worked for Baker Hughes from our local bar).

His qualification was that he was making 20k a month USD and had all his bills paid by his company - this was when 1k USD was the average in Moscow and if you made 3k USD you were a fairly serious baller.

His advice was: 'save 10% each month and read the Millionaire Next Door' lol

That was it, the best I got!

No mention of fiat, economics, trying to own assets, or even gold. Just save some fiat. I took the advice and then spent all my savings within a few months after I lost my job.

I used to ask him when he didn't just buy a house or two and rent them while he was living in Russia and he just wasn't interested at all. He could have acquired all kinds of assets.

I tried reading Tony Robbin's book about mastering the money game, and apart from it all being America-centric, you needed a brokerage account (when they were expensive) and it kept banging on about the magic of compound interest, but it just made me sad because banks basically weren't even paying interest, so what was I supposed to compound!

Pretty fucking depressing, but thankfully we have bitcoin