Is talking about money still considered impolite?

Talking about money Now let's go.I'm getting closer.

Aha!Is it real?No, it's fake money.- Oh, it's not real.

It says:"Is talking about money still considered bad manners?" I think it is.

Talking about money in Portugal is taboo.You don't talk about money at the table,you don't ask how much something costs.

In New York, almost the second question people ask you is:"So, what's your net worth?" Like: "How much are you worth?" And in Portugal, imagine I ask someone:"How much do you make?" They would think I'm completely out of place.

So, I think it's still a taboo and considered impolite,You don't talk about money at the table.

I think that has huge implications for our lack of financial education.

Because then our parents don't know, and that means they can't teach us either and we also don't get that kind of education at school.

There's a great lack of knowledge about how to manage money.

And I'll give you a very simple example.My father passed away, a year after I started working at Microsoft.and that was one of the main reasons why I wanted to retire early, at 50.

Then, I wanted to have time. If the same thing happened to me as to my father,who died at 54, when would I have time to enjoy life if I had to wait until retirement?

So when I decided to make my financial plan for retirement,I already knew how to control my money.

I knew how much came into my account, how much went out and where it went.

I knew how to save because I come from a humble family.

I always knew the importance of money and that money wasn't meant to be wasted.

It was meant to be saved and decisions should be made carefully.

I also knew that I had to live below my means,because we can't spend all our money, we shouldn't have delusions of grandeur.

It can't be "whatever comes in, gets spent." I've always lived a life well below my means.

But I was missing the last part, which was investing.

My parents taught me the importance of money and to save it,they taught me how to manage it, but they themselves didn't know how to invest.

For my parents, investing meant putting money into a term deposit,or into savings certificates.

And of course, we all know that a term deposit gives around 1% per year,and on top of that you have to pay taxes, while inflation is at 3%.

Which means that even if you put your money in a deposit to earn interest,since it only gives 1% and inflation is 3%, you're actually losing purchasing power.

The money is generating something, but we can no longer buy the same things.

I had to learn how to invest.What helped me was living in the USA, where 40% of the population invests in the stock market.

And I went to learn.I read about the subject, listened to many podcasts, watched many YouTube videos.

And I learned how I could make my money work for me.

Or how I could make it grow through investments.And my parents couldn't teach me that, because they didn't know either.

Mostly because of this.Because we believe that talking about money is impolite.

What happens when we don't talk about something?We don't understand how it works, we don't know what to do,what decisions to make, what makes sense and what doesn't.

It's almost like… Like ostriches, right?Burying our heads in the sand and waiting for everything to happen around us.

It can't be like that.We have to talk about money, we have to understand how money works,we have to understand how we can make money work for us.

My book is better, but there's a book over there at the newsstand that says that there are four types of people in the world:the first group of people are those who work for someone else and, therefore, receive a salary and often live from what they earn.

There's a second group of people, who are those who work on their own.

They're usually self-employed professionals: doctors,sometimes lawyers, right?

So, the more they work, the more money they make,they work on their own.

There's the third group, made up of people who own companies,they actually hire the people from group one, and keep a profit for themselves, because they pay salaries to others, but the margin,the value of money, stays with the company owners.

And the fourth category, made up of people who make money work for them.

What we want, and this book talks about that,is to move from that first category of people, the ones who depend on a salary at the end of the month, employees, to becoming people who make money work for them.

Now then, if we believe that talking about money is impolite and hold on to that belief, we will never move from category 1 to category 4 to make money work for us, to make it grow for us,to have it generate passive income for us, to give us, as if it were a salary,the means to live from our investments instead of living off a paycheck from a company.