#unironically passionate about this and yes my socialist credentials are in dire shape

[unnameablethings]

as someone who works in investment finance this is all very correct but I DO want to expand on a point you made. I totally understand the simplification there for a finance beginner - it does totally make sense to just think of 401k contributions as the same thing as investing your money in bonds or an index fund. However, a 401k is NOT a type of index fund! It is a type of retirement account that lets you avoid paying taxes on any money you put in. It acts more like a big wallet to hold your index funds and other investments in. It's easy to get confused about that because normally the money you put into your 401k will be automatically invested in an index fund for you, but the 401k is just the bucket the investment is happening in. This can be really important because 1. a lot of people don't realize they can PICK what their 401k is invested in, and 2. a 401k is an employer plan, so if you ever leave your job or decide to save for retirement outside of your job, you will probably be putting your money in an Individual Retirement Account (IRA.) AN IRA DOES NOT AUTOMATICALLY INVEST. You have to go in and manually put the money in your IRA into an index fund or else it will just be sitting in cash and not earning you money.

(because I'm on the topic - the difference there can be HUGE. If you're sitting here thinking "ew stonks, that's too risky, I'll just keep my money in a nice safe savings account," you might want to think about the risks a little differently. If you're invested in an S&P 500 index fund (which is one of the most common ones), the historical inflation-adjusted return on that is about 7% per year. At 7% per year, you will have DOUBLED your money in 10 years. If you invest $10,000 in 2025, you would have $20,000 in today's dollars in 2035 without putting ANY more money in. If you keep it in cash earning 0 interest, you will LOSE money. That's because inflation will steal the value of your dollars. At the current rate of about 2.85% inflation per year, you would go from having $10,000 in today's dollars in 2025 to $7,500 in today's dollars in 2035. With the index fund, you have market risk, where the stock market could go down in value and you could lose money that way, but in cash you have inflation risk, and will almost definitely lose at least some of your money.)

Generally speaking, here are the order of financial priorities:

Build an emergency savings of at least 3 months worth of living expenses

Pay down all high-interest debts, such as credit card debts

Build an emergency savings of 6 months - year worth of expenses.

Place some of your savings in a high-yield savings account (or money market fund) that you can still access easily without penalty if you need that money.

Start considering investing in something that yields a higher rate of return, but requires that you let money just *sit* in that investment for months or years at a time (CDs/bonds/index funds/a 401k [which is really just a type of index fund usually]).

Learn how to let your investments just sit without constantly looking at them or worrying about them! This is a skill that requires time, practice, and sometimes research to develop.

As your circumstances change and your familiarity and comfort with investing grows, tweak your exact investment strategy as needed. (For example, shift some money from index funds to bonds as you get older, or move CD investments to stocks as interest rates go down).