As an average Joe, I’ve done the average thing. I went to university and completed a meaningless degree that my parents wanted me to do. They didn’t care what it was or whether it was going anywhere — they just wanted to be able to say their child “went to university.” I got into debt for a piece of paper that no employer has ever asked to see evidence of!

I then settled into nothing jobs and got on with the 9–5. I’ve worked in offices, factories, and fields. Across my forty-odd jobs, I’ve held temp roles lasting weeks and months, through to years and decades. I’ve worked in almost every industry, earning average pay. I got married and had kids.

I always had an interest in economics and nearly pursued a career in it — until a second-year course of my commerce degree disabused me of that notion. I was exposed to complicated equations that looked like graffiti and were supposedly designed to model the economy. Greek letters, differential equations, and absurd assumptions. I knew from the first lesson that, even if I could understand it, it was total nonsense. Maybe it worked in theory, but it wasn’t useful in the real world. Economics is the study of human behaviour, and I don’t care how much they try to “science it up” — we don’t conform to logically flawed formulas.

Years later, I found I was right to be sceptical when the “Great Financial Crisis” of ’08 exposed these people as charlatans of the highest order. In fact, far too many of these “economists” have no idea how the economy functions at all. With good reason, the modern economic system is deliberately complicated, built on a centuries old sleight of hand – first honed by Venetian financiers, perfected by corporate states like the Dutch East India Company, and still cloaked in abstraction by modern world banks.

I did the usual student and mortgage debt routine but never properly looked into investing. To be fair, it was harder back then — you had to buy a certain number of shares, have a broker, and there were no fractional shares or online platforms like today. Now, with cryptocurrency and Bitcoin, we’ve got 24/7 trading — unheard of back then.

I worked for a dot-com business just before that industry hit the rocks in the early 2000s. I remember telling people I thought Amazon would survive because they sold physical books rather than ideas or abstract nonsense. People asked me what the hell Amazon was! Another one I told people about was this thing called Google — a brilliant search engine, far better than anything available at the time. But can you imagine being asked “What’s a Google?” as I was then? It’s become a noun and a verb in the years since.

I could see those things were going to be huge — imagine if I’d put my money where my mouth was! Mind you, I’m not claiming to be any kind of guru. I owned an Apple computer in 2000 and was convinced the company wouldn’t last, because the hardware was flimsy junk. Now it’s one of the largest companies in the world, with a market cap over $3 trillion. Win some, lose some, right?

Well — no. Because I didn’t have any skin in the game. I missed countless opportunities by playing it safe. And the truth is, I wouldn’t even have needed to pick the winners. Sure, Amazon and Apple would’ve been great — but even a boring old dividend-paying stock with automatic dividend reinvestment could’ve made a fortune over the years. All I had to do was invest a portion of my pay each month and leave it alone to do its thing.

So what qualifies me to write about money?

BECAUSE of those missed opportunities.

Oh, to go back and tell my younger self to hook up the modem, open Netscape Navigator, or Ask Jeeves or Yahoo, and type in “Yourtreasurecompass.com.” The right heading on an open ocean of possibilities — and the power of compounding — would’ve made me an absolute fortune.

But it’s never too late to get on the right course. As long as you’ve got your health and your family, the rest is just a splash of rum in the grog