How Should I Start my Finance Life and Invest?
The best way to start out is to know that even the experts typically under-perform the market, so you have no chance.  Your best bet is to invest in diversified funds, either through something like Betterment or something like Vanguard's ETFs that track the markets.  Buying individual stocks isn't typically a winning strategy. I'd suggest looking at something like the Dummies series of books for this.   Something like: Sometimes the books are combined into one big book.  This would be the best bet.  It's were I started.  Every time I wondered something I just looked it up and learned. They are perfectly fine for the novice. Hope this helps.
Many good sources on YouTube that you can find easily once you know what to look for.  Start following the stock market, present value / future value, annuities &amp; perpetuities, bonds, financial ratios, balance sheets and P&amp;L statements, ROI, ROA, ROE, cash flows, net present value and IRR, forecasting, Monte Carlo simulation (heavy on stats but useful in finance), the list goes on.  If you can find a cheap textbook, it'll help with the concepts.  Investopedia is sometimes useful in learning concepts but not really on application.  Khan Academy is a good YouTube channel.  The Intelligent Investor is a good foundational book for investing.  There are several good case studies on Harvard Business Review to practice with.  I've found that case studies are most helpful in learning how to apply concept and think outside the box.  Discover how you can apply it to aspects of your everyday life.  Finance is a great profession to pursue.  Good luck on your studies! I have managed two IRA accounts; one I inherited from my wife's 401K and my own's 457B.  I managed actively my wife's 401 at Tradestation which doesn't restrict on Options except level 5 as naked puts and calls. I moved half of my 457B funds to TDAmeritrade, the only broker authorized by my employer, to open a Self Directed account.  However, my 457 plan disallows me from using a Cash-secured Puts, only Covered Calls.  For those who does not know investing, I resent the contention that participants to these IRAs should not be messing around with their IRA funds.  For years, I left my 401k/457B funds with my current fund custodian, Great West Financial.  I checked it's current values once or twice a year. These last years, the market dived in the last 2 quarters of 2015 and another dive early January and February of 2016.  I lost a total of $40K leaving my portfolio with my current custodian choosing all 30 products they offer, 90% of them are ETFs and the rest are bonds. If you don't know investing, better leave it with the pros - right?  But no one can predict the future of the market.  Even the pros are at the mercy of the market. So, I you know how to invest and choose your stocks, I don't think your plan administrator has to limit you on how you manage your funds. For example, if you are not allowed to place a Cash-Secured Puts and you just Buy the stocks or EFT at market or even limit order, you buy the securities at their market value. If you sell a Cash-secured puts against the stocks/ETF you are interested in buying, you will receive a credit in fraction of a dollar in a specific time frame.  In average, your cost to owning a stock/ETF is lesser if you buy it at market or even a limit order.  Most of the participants of the IRA funds rely too much on their portfolio manager because they don't know how to manage. If you try to educate yourself at a minimum, you will have a good understanding of how your IRA funds are tied up to the market.  If you know how to trade in bear market compared to bull market, then you are good at managing your investments.  When I started contributing to my employer's deferred comp account (457B) as a public employee, I have no idea of how my portfolio works.  Year after year as I looked at my investment, I was happy because it continued to grow.  Without scrutinizing how much it grew yearly, and my regular payroll contribution, I am happy even it only grew 2% per year.  And at this age that I am ready to retire at 60, I started taking investment classes and attended pre-retirement seminars.  Then I knew that it was not totally a good decision to leave your retirement funds in the hands of the portfolio manager since they don't really care if it tanked out on some years as long at overall it grew to a meager 1%-4% because they managers are pretty conservative on picking the equities they invest.  You can generalize that maybe 90% of IRA investors don't know about investing and have poor decision making actions which securities/ETF to buy and hold. For those who would like to remain as one, that is fine.  But for those who spent time and money to study and know how to invest, I don't think the plan manager can limit the participants ability to manage their own portfolio especially if the funds have no matching from the employer like mine. All I can say to all who have IRA or any retirement accounts, educate yourself early because if you leave it all to your portfolio managers, you lost a lot.  Don't believe much in what those commercial fund managers also show in their presentation just to move your funds for them to manage.  Be proactive.  If you start learning how to invest now when you are young, JUST DO IT! "This is a tough question, because it is something very specific to your situation and finances. I personally started at a young age (17), with US$1,000 in Scottrade. I tried the ""stock market games"" at first, but in retrospect they did nothing for me and turned out to be a waste of time. I really started when I actually opened my brokerage account, so step one would be to choose your discount broker. For example, Scottrade, Ameritrade (my current broker), E-Trade, Charles Schwab, etc. Don't worry about researching them too much as they all offer what you need to start out. You can always switch later (but this can be a little of a hassle). For me, once I opened my brokerage account I became that much more motivated to find a stock to invest in. So the next step and the most important is research! There are many good resources on the Internet (there can also be some pretty bad ones). Here's a few I found useful: Investopedia - They offer many useful, easy-to-understand explanations and definitions. I found myself visiting this site a lot. CNBC - That was my choice for business news. I found them to be the most watchable while being very informative. Fox Business, seems to be more political and just annoying to watch. Bloomberg News was just ZzzzZzzzzz (boring). On CNBC, Jim Cramer was a pretty useful resource. His show Mad Money is entertaining and really does teach you to think like an investor. I want to note though, I don't recommend buying the stocks he recommends, specially the next day after he talks about them. Instead, really pay attention to the reasons he gives for his recommendation. It will teach you to think more like an investor and give you examples of what you should be looking for when you do research. You can also use many online news organizations like MarketWatch, The Motley Fool, Yahoo Finance (has some pretty good resources), and TheStreet. Read editorial (opinions) articles with a grain of salt, but again in each editorial they explain why they think the way they think." 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. Got a degree in finance and I'll talk about simple ways to really improve your learning experience:  excel will be your best friend. Get comfortable with it. Learn; pivot tables, formulas, formatting, and macros.  Learn to type at a decent speed. Many students still type slow. It will hinder you  Current events is the best way to stay informed. Always be reading up on business information. Pretty much twice a day.   Join a free stock market game and track how you do. Get on it twice a week and make trades frequent based on what you think.   I can elaborate more if you have any more questions ! It depends on whether you want a career as a fund manager/ analyst or if you want to be an investor/ trader. A fund manager will have many constraints that a private investor doesn’t have, as they are managing other people’s money.  If they do invest their own money as well they usually would invest it differently from how they invest the fund's money. Many would just get someone else to invest their money for them, just as a surgeon would get another surgeon to operate on a family member. My suggestion to you is to find a job you like doing and build up your savings. Whilst you are building up your savings read some books. You said you don’t know much about the financial markets, then learn about them. Get yourself a working knowledge about both fundamental and technical analysis. Work out which method of analysis (if not both) suits you best and you would like to know more about. As you read you will get a better idea if you prefer to be a long term investor or a short term trader or somewhere in-between or a combination of various methods. Now you will start to get an idea of what type of books and areas of analysis you would like to concentrate on. Once you have a better idea of what you would like to do and have gained some knowledge, then you can develop your investment/trading plan and start paper trading. Once you are happy with you plan and your paper trading you can start trading with a small account balance (not more than $10,000 and preferably under $5,000). No matter how well you did with paper trading you will always do worse with real money at first due to your emotions being in it now. So always start off small. If you want to become good at something it takes time and a lot of hard work. You can’t go from knowing nothing to making a million dollars per year without putting in the hard yards first. We don't have a good answer for how to start investing in poland.  We do have good answers for the more general case, which should also work in Poland.  E.g. Best way to start investing, for a young person just starting their career? This answer provides a checklist of things to do.  Let's see how you're doing:   Match on work pension plan. You don't mention this.  May not apply in Poland, but ask around in case it does.  Given your income, you should be doing this if it's available.   Emergency savings. You have plenty.  Either six months of spending or six months of income.  Make sure that you maintain this.  Don't let us talk you into putting all your money in better long term investments.   High interest debt. You don't have any.  Keep up the good work.   Avoid PMI on mortgage. As I understand it, you don't have a mortgage.  If you did, you should probably pay it off.  Not sure if PMI is an issue in Poland.   Roth IRA. Not sure if this is an issue in Poland.  A personal retirement account in the US.   Additional 401k. A reminder to max out whatever your work pension plan allows.  The name here is specific to the United States.  You should be doing this in whatever form is available.   After that, I disagree with the options.  I also disagree with the order a bit, but the basic idea is sound:  one time opportunities; emergency savings; eliminate debt; maximize retirement savings.  Check with a tax accountant so as not to make easily avoidable tax mistakes.   You can use some of the additional money for things like real estate or a business.  Try to keep under 20% for each.  But if you don't want to worry about that kind of stuff, it's not that important.  There's a certain amount of effort to maintain either of those options.  If you don't want to put in the effort to do that, it makes sense not to do this.   If you have additional money split the bulk of it between stock and bond index funds.  You want to maintain a mix between about 70/30 and 75/25 stocks to bonds.  The index funds should be based on broad indexes.  They probably should be European wide for the most part, although for stocks you might put 10% or so in a Polish fund and another 15% in a true international fund.   Think over your retirement plans.  Where do you want to live?  In your current apartment?  In a different apartment in the same city?  In one of the places where you inherited property?  Somewhere else entirely?  Also, do you like to vacation in that same place?   Consider buying a place in the appropriate location now (or keeping the one you have if it's one of the inherited properties).  You can always rent it out until then.  Many realtors are willing to handle the details for you.   If the place that you want to retire also works for vacations, consider short term rentals of a place that you buy.  Then you can reserve your vacation times while having rentals pay for maintenance the rest of the year.   As to the stuff that you have now:   Look that over and see if you want any of it.  You also might check if there are any other family members that might be interested.  E.g. cousins, aunts, uncles, etc.  If not, you can probably sell it to a professional company that handles estate sales.  Make sure that they clear out any junk along with the valuable stuff.   Consider keeping furniture for now.  Sometimes it can help sell a property.   You might check if you want to drive either of them.  If not, the same applies, check family first.  Otherwise, someone will buy them, perhaps on consignment (they sell for a commission rather than buying and reselling).   There's no hurry to sell these.  Think over whether you might want them.   Consider if they hold any sentimental value to you or someone else.  If not, sell them.  If there's any difficulty finding a buyer, consider renting them out.  You can also rent them out if you want time to make a decision.  Don't leave them empty too long.  There's maintenance that may need done, e.g. heat to keep water from freezing in the pipes.   That's easy, just invest that.   I wouldn't get in too much of a hurry to donate to charity.  You can always do that later.  And try to donate anonymously if you can.  Donating often leads to spam, where they try to get you to donate more. I would suggest equity research, or as mentioned, consulting. You could go into IB. Your main hindrance is your age, how long has it been since you finished your PhD?  Equity Research: you will analyze companies, on an individual and micro basis, and provide macro point of views on the industry etc.   Sales/Trading: you will not get a job in trading, sales...maybe, if you get a bank large enough that has a healthcare/industrial chemicals sales positions, but this is a job that requires you to be able to sell your bank's point of view to large, very sophisticated clients, and provide them with better ideas than other sales guys, so that they will trade with your bank...can you learn finance and the industry fast enough? You would be better off working in a buy side shop (there are tons in boston)  IB: never met anyone that likes ib. depends on the bank but even mid market small banks it is 80hr weeks on avg. bulge bracket its 100. but you would likely start as an associate, (if at all) so that would go down really fast, (3-5 yrs to vp)  If you went to a top tier school, find alum from your school that work at banks and talk to them first, a 30 min conversation with anyone is incredibly useful. Just ask them how to get in. Also make sure you know all the capital markets firms in your area, know what all the fields are from a basic level (read the shit on wallstreetoasis etc) so that you dont waste time when talking to people.   You will likely need a CFA level 1 to get any traction, unless you can find some people that are willing to pull for you, which you will find is actually more simple than it seems - people love helping their alma matter, and every firm is always looking for smart people. anyways, sign up for the december 2012 cfa exam, and download/buy the schweser notes (don't read the actual books) this will be a great refresher about finance and economics even if you don't end up switching careers.  actual answers to your questions 1) yes 2) start as an associate in ib, spend 3 years doing bs, and workin average 90hrs a week, either quit of become vp and start selling work vs doing it 3) ib: immediate sales/trading: immediate, buy side: varies on the firm, size, performance, could be immediate, could be the year after, or you could get fired after 3 months because your phd isnt as useful as they thought it was. 4) mentioned above...a few years, its managable, suck it up 5) no sorry   goodluck