Totally new to finance, economy, where should I start?
A couple of good books I enjoyed and found very understandable (regarding the stock market): As for investment information you can get lost for days in Investopedia.  Start in the stock section and click around. The tutorials here (free) give a good introduction to different financial topics. Regarding theoretical knowledge: start with what you know well, like your career or your other interests.  You'll get a running start that way. Beyond that, it depends on what area of finance you want to start with.  If it's your personal finances, I and a lot of other bloggers write about it all the time.  Any of the bloggers on my blogroll (see my profile for the link) will give you a good perspective.  If you want to go head first into planning your financial life, take a look at Brett Wilder's The Quiet Millionaire.  It's very involved and thorough. And, of course, ask questions here. If you're looking to invest using stocks and shares, I recommend you set up an account at something like Google Finance - it is free and user-friendly with lots of online help. You can set up some 'virtual cash' and put it into a number of stocks which it'll track for you. Review your progress and close some positions and open others as often as you want, but remember to enter some figure for the cost of the transaction, say $19.95 for a trade, to discourage you from high-frequency trading. Take it as seriously as you want - if you stick to your original cash input, you'll see real results. If you throw in more virtual cash than you could in real life, it'll muddle the outcome. After some evaluation period, say 3 months, look back at your progress. You will learn a tremendous amount from doing this and don't need to have read any books or spent any money to get started. Knowing which stocks to pick and when to buy or sell is much more subtle - see other answers for suggestions. I'd start with learning how to read a company's financial statement and their annual report. I would recommend reading the following: All three books are cheap and readily available. If you really want to enhance your learning, grab a few annual reports from companies' websites to reference as you learn about different aspects of the financial statements. I'm going to be a bit off topic and recommend 'The Only Investment Book You'll Ever Need' by Andrew Tobias. It doesn't start with describe the workings of the stock market. Instead, it starts with making sure you have a budget and have your basic finances in order BEFORE going into the stock market. This may not sound like what you are looking for, but it really is a valuable book to read, even if you think you are all set up in that department.
"&gt; They deficit spend. They increase prosperity and thus demand.  But what I'm saying is that there are more efficient ways of accomplishing this that doesn't involve any debt whatsoever. If the the debt money being spent is coming from your paycheck in the form of an increased cost of living then merely increasing the ratio of wages to capital returns would provide the same benefit without debt. In fact, this means of driving demand is so efficient that if you take it too far it'll drive stagflation when the cost to capital returns exceeds an optimal ratio.   &gt;The interesting side effect is, that they are making the economy do better  Yes, it certainly does over a limited number of years following the debt incurred. But it is ONLY an economic benefit because that same demand has already been taken from the economy in the form of wage suppression. As a ratio of returns and not absolute values. If those wage returns were too high relative to returns, like in the 1970s in the US, then driving more demand through debt spending would be the opposite of a benefit. It's ONLY a short term benefit because that demand has already been taken from your wages.  &gt;The government gives you more income than it takes from you in taxes.  This is true in more ways than one, and I'm not absolutely certain in which sense you mean it. In terms of say the earned income tax credit, it's nowhere near enough to cover the losses incurred through wage suppression. In terms of teachers, infrastructure up to a point, etc., these things have a productive return on investment.  &gt;Every bit of cut spending removes income from the population.  No. Not that the spending cuts being done are anything but harmful and costing the economy. But paying people to count flies on roadkill is not helpful at all. And if it results in a net positive it's because the economy is in a bad state of mismanagement, with wages (as an aggregate ratio of returns) too suppressed for a healthy economy. It's like cutting people and saying it benefits the economy by increasing the sale of band-aids and driving demand for doctors. Of course the band-aids help, but it doesn't mean the policies that makes it a benefit anything but a cost.   Once wages, as an aggregate ratio of returns, exceeds an optimal ratio, [like in the 1970s](http://www-tc.pbs.org/prod-media/newshour/photos/2012/12/06/Andrew_Smithers_chart_blog_main_horizontal.JPG), then every new increase in demand results in a new deficit in supply that cannot be met due to constraints on capital returns. I call this a supply constrained economy, as opposed to the demand constrained economy we now live in. In this kind of economic environment there would even be any short term benefits to funding consumption with debt.  So basically you have two choices. Make everybody wealthy enough to match supply, while trying not to exceed it to avoid triggering too much inflation and encouraging investment in new productive capacity. Or suppressing wage returns too much relative to total returns inducing excessively low, and potentially negative, inflation. Making almost everybody much poorer than necessary. Then trying to fix the imbalance between supply and demand through debt spending. I would call the second choice a fools choice.  But none of this means that funding for teachers, social workers, etc., should go away. These things need their funding, and we should be paying the taxes to fund them. Not pretending that debt spending will let of have our cake and eat it to. It's like a pot luck dinner in which people bring IOUs in place of dishes until people are leaving dinner hungry because there's not enough to go around.  &gt;Our economic trouble has nothing to do with efficiency and how much work needs to be done, and everything to do with how much money people have to spend.  That is in fact true in our present economic circumstances. But that situation was created by wage suppression relative to total returns in aggregate. But, as the 1970s demonstrated, the opposite can also be true. This realization is what drove the Reagan revolution. Only the Fed policy operates, monetary easing and all, on the assumption that this is driven by the employment rate, or [NAIRU](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAIRU). It's not. It's driven by the aggregate ratio between capital to labor returns. And leads to bad economic conditions differently at both extremes. Which is why they find our present economic situation an enigmatic mystery.   The mistake of thinking ""how much money people have to spend,"" i.e., strictly demand side driven economics, is what created the economic problems that lead to Reagan. Only now the power structure takes the opposite extreme. In which supply side driven economics has become an article of faith. This is why the older generation, like myself, say and believe such bat shit crazy things about the economy today. The same older generation now that now drives politics. Because they came of age in the 1970s when what you are saying would have been a phenomenally bad policy. A policy that gave us stagflation that many classical Keynesian's thought impossible before then. They can't believe something that was so bad can now be a good thing. But it in fact is. Because the important thing for prosperity and growth is the optimal balance between supply and demand. Not the argument over whether the economy is supply side driven or demand side driven. Because either of those agendas can push the economy out of balance.  Automation will pretty certainly change everything about economics in the coming years. But that is not why we are in the situation we are in at this particular moment." "I think you are right. Even given both the randomness of Monopoly (roll of dice, shuffle of chance/community chess cards), and the skill differentiation between players (my model took this into account) it is deterministic enough that once the game is played for X interval, the randomness cannot overcome the previous outcomes. In fact, what we actually see is a hardening of those outcomes over time (ie: just continuing to play the game exacerbates the inequality as the previously handicapped player keeps landing on property already owned by the previously un-handicapped players).  I think the conclusions are completely based on how deterministic you think our capitalist/democratic system is - or, more simply, how well Monopoly serves as a metaphor for our economy.   I think we can answer that question (or at least determine how we individually feel about it) by raising a simple thought experiment.  Imagine you live on a road where there are 4 families and the parents sit down to play Monopoly one night. 3 of the families are white and the parents are racists and set the rules unfairly against the 4th family. After 2 hours of play, the adults from the 4th family are losing miserably and everyone decides to go home. The next morning, before the adults wake up, the kids from each family decide to play Monopoly together as well. But this new generation isn't racist at all. They announce ""the rules will be the same for everyone from here on out""! The children from the black family are relieved and begin to clean up the board from the previous night and start the game over. But the other 3 families object - ""wait, no, my family earned that! We start where we left off!"".  It seems to me this is very similar to how our economy works. The vast majority of our wealth within generations is spent on raising the next generation (from the homes, food, health, and clothes we purchase to better educational opportunities, and finally direct-wealth transition through inheritance or at least financially sufficient parents that don't require investments from grown children in retirement).   I think it is a plausible theory that doesn't require us to say that anyone is racist or anyone is inferior. It would also explain phenomenon like this:  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/09/28/black-and-hispanic-families-are-making-more-money-but-they-still-lag-far-behind-whites/" Thanks for the writeup, it was a really informative read. I've been aware for a while now that Reagan and Reaganomics were in a large way the 'start' of most of the current problems in the economic and political landscape, but you filled in a few gaps that were really useful for me.  So I guess ultimately a lot of conservatives see it as a kind of necessary evil in order to bring about the success story that the current economy needs right now. Unfortunately, their strategy is totally wrong. That kind of makes sense with my observation that rather than supporting the cronyism and corruption, they turn a blind eye to it because they think it's necessary.  My view is not so much that labour and finance capital returns need to be balanced (although that is probably a great thing to aim for), but that creation of wealth/capital needs to be intrinsically linked with the creation of real value. The modern banking crisis was a great example of the ability to generate wealth while in fact destroying real value. Look through the related questions.  Make sure you fund the max your tax advantaged retirement funds will take this year.  Use the 30k to backstop any shortfalls.  Invest the rest in a brokerage account. In and out of your tax advantaged accounts, try to invest in index funds.  Your feeling that paying someone to manage your investments might not be the best use is shared by many.  jlcollinsnh is a financial independence blogger.  He, and many others, recommend the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Admiral Shares.  I have not heard of a lower expense ratio (0.05%). Search for financial independence and FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early).  Use your windfall to set yourself on that road, and you will be less likely to sit where I am 25 years from now wishing you had done things differently. Edit:  Your attitude should be that the earliest money in your portfolio is in there the longest, and earns the most.  Starting with a big windfall puts you years ahead of where you'd normally be.  If you set your goal to retire at 40, that money will be worth significantly more in 20 years. (4x what you start with, assuming 7% average yearly return). Is there an indicator about what percentage must be paid when?  Where does economics end and finance start?  I feel quite geeky, but I have been studying a bit of finance, and listening to bloomberg while I work (I am software dev) and want to understand everything :D  edit: just found about this [https://www.google.com/publicdata](https://www.google.co.uk/publicdata/explore?ds=ds22a34krhq5p_&amp;met_y=gd_pc_gdp&amp;idim=country:pt:es:el&amp;hl=en&amp;dl=en#!ctype=l&amp;strail=false&amp;bcs=d&amp;nselm=h&amp;met_y=gd_mio_eur&amp;scale_y=lin&amp;ind_y=false&amp;rdim=country_group&amp;idim=country:pt:es:el:de:fr:uk&amp;idim=country_group:eu&amp;ifdim=country_group&amp;hl=en_US&amp;dl=en&amp;ind=false) I'm not really sure yet. I know I'm beginning my upper level finance courses (Corp. Finance &amp; Investments this Autumn) so I am going to try and see what I like. Investments have always attracted me but I have to experience it before I can say what I would like. I'm really open to anything.  I know excel quite well (thought of getting Microsoft certified to put on resume) and stats have always been fun for me. I took 2 intro to accounting courses but have forgotten most of the material. Is there any part of accounting you recommend is valuable (auditing, financial acct, reporting &amp; financial statements, etc.; maybe any course suggestions bc I know Ohio State Uni has multiple courses on different acct topics)? "There are books like, ""The Millionaire Mind"" that could be of interest when it comes to basics like living below your means, investing what you save, etc. that while it is common sense, it is uncommonly done in the world.  Something to consider is how actively do you want your money management to be?  Is it something to spend hours on each week or a few hours a year tops?  You have lots of choices and decisions to make. I would suggest keeping part of your savings as an emergency fund just in case something happens.  As for another part, this is where you could invest in a few different options and see what happens. There would be a couple of different methods I could see for breaking into finance that I'd imagine: IT of a finance company - In this case you'd likely be working on customizations for what the bank, insurance or other kind of financial firm requires.  This could be somewhat boring as you are basically a part of the backbone that keeps the company going but not really able to take much of the glory when the company makes a lot of money. Brains of a hedge fund - In this case, you may have to know some trading algorithms and handle updating the code so that the trading activities can be done by a computer with lightning speed.  Harder to crack into since these would be the secretive people to find and join in a way." Go check out wallstreetoasis.com. There are a lot of people out there like you and that site has a lot of folks in the industry. It's segregated by arms so you'll also probably be able to get a feel for what kind of finance you might or might not be suited for.