(Part 2) Top products from r/AusFinance

Growth is good, but you can do better by getting directly into the underlying funds themself. However, if you just choose 'growth' option, you'll be doing a lot better then most people who just ignore super completely and waste away a lot of potential earninigs.

It would be easy for me to say to you "just invest in X Y & Z", but the problem is that it would be much better for you, if you took the time to understand why I would be telling you that in the first place. Learning about investments properly and having a competent understanding will change & improve your life a great deal and will give you a big edge over other people your own age.

I highly recommend that you find & read this book:- https://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Teacher-Wealth-Should-Learned/dp/0470830069

I recommend this book specifically because I have found it is very easy to read and not intimidating for anyone from a non-financial background. I used to give this book to staff members who worked for me in a previous job where I had a lot of 18-25 year old staff members reporting to me, and they all said they wish information like this had been taught in high school.

There are other books you could read of course, but I have found this one is the best for people who are "newbies" to dealing with finance, wealth & investments.

Of course, I'm happy to answer any other questions you might have.

Disclaimer: I'm mid20s guy with less invested in shares than I have in my super. The following is what I did to get started in investing which sounds like you're about where I was a year or two ago.

First of all; depending on your circumstances be aware that ING Direct's or ME Bank's savings accounts are currently giving 3.00% interest which might be better than your term deposit if you don't want to go whole hog into shares right away. (ING Direct also does $50 bonus referral codes so expect a flood of PMs now that I've mentioned this)

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As for books:
/r/FI's wiki makes some good recommendations from what I've read of them

>Investing

>* The Bogleheads Guide to Investing

• A Random Walk Down Wallstreet
  
• The Four Pillars of Investing
  
• The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns
  
• Millionaire Teacher: The Nine Rules of Wealth You Should Have Learned in School -- Suggestion - Ignore Rule 9 regarding individual stock picking.
  
• The Intelligent Investor -- Caution - Embark on individual stock ownership at your own risk.
  
  The lowest barrier to entry would be that "acorns" app but I strongly recommend taking the couple days to make a CMC account or some other online brokerage with low fees and buy ETFS through that instead so that you're actually learning how it all works and not just pressing buttons on an app. Link it up with free Sharesight account for pretty graphs and easy tax reporting and that should teach you more about "having a share portfolio" than the majority of the population.
  
  Obviously this subreddit and /r/fiaustralia in the sidebar are worth keeping an eye on for insight from people with more skin in the game than me.
  
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  Now, the other option is you want to ACTIVELY trade that $1k. If you've read some of Bogle's explanations on why that's a bad idea, realised you'll be competing against people with much bigger budgets and a full time job anaysing these things and understand that even at CMC's low $13 flat fee you're losing 1.3% of your $1k packet with every trade then you'll need advice from someone other than me.
  
  Personally the best investment I think I have made so far was my $1k of "beer money" that I threw into bitcoin. Not because it made a good return, but because after months of careful analysis, frequent trading and keeping an ear to the ground on new alt coins I turned my 3.5 bitcoin into 1.05. I didn't end up losing a cent thanks to other factors but seeing how badly my "high risk, high gain, actively managed portfolio" went I'm ecstatic that I learned my lesson with $1k and not with my self-managed super fund at 57 y/o like several people I know.
  
  TL;DR: Anything by John Bogle

My favourite first investment book is Timothy Vick "How to Pick Stocks Like Warren Buffett: Profiting from the Bargain Hunting Strategies of the World's Greatest Value Investor"

It's a great place to start.

the below is a bit disjointed and more like a ELI10, but based on real life ppl I know:

Paying a lot more than you needed to for something is always a bad idea, whatever its for (unless helping a friend with some new business, like buying overpriced breakfast at their new cafe).

Too many ppl think that if you bought a house to live in it doesn't matter what you paid for it since 30yrs later it should be worth more anyways. From a non-Australian perspective, this is sheer madness, and for me a great illustration of how masses of ppl just buy into bad ideas.

A real, concrete, very hard to deal with issue with overpaying for housing is that lots of ppl did so at the extreme utter super duper maximum of what they could conceivably afford if everything went well. But many signs point to that everything might not go swimmingly, from global events (US/China tariffs, climate change) to local things - an Australian recession triggered by one of the many ongoing factors, like a government unable to implement decent policies, slowing construction, slowing demand for Australian exports, yada yada.

there are real life ppl who have committed to humongous mortgages in Australia in the last 2-3 yrs which are already underwater - this means they can't sell their house if they are struggling with payments, or they bought the wrong thing, or they realised (too late) that they don't like having to pay half their income to the bank, and the associated pressures of needed to stay in that high paying job with no option of ever switching to other things they always wanted to do.

To some extent, this is a firstworldproblem, I mean they have their cake (a nice job) and the icing (a nice house) but its still stressful and lowers quality of life for ppl who are otherwise seemingly doing quite well. I'd argue that debt is a huge mental burden for a significant amount of the people holding overpriced mortgages, and there isn't enough discussion in this country about it.

Besides the personal stuff, there are a lot of big picture society level implications of high housing pricing - see Death and Life of Great American Cities for a nice intro discussion on how housing effects ppl living there.

The other thing which has been ongoing in Australia for many years now is that the very fabric of Australia is changing - I don't know of many older Aussies whose kids stay anywhere close to them - except in a few cases where the bank of mum and dad essentially bought the house or rented one of their IP's for cheap to their kids. This doesn't seem very healthy to me.

Its not good for society to form communities based mostly on income. You end up with communities which are very stratified by income and family wealth, and some books argue quite convincingly that this really makes it hard for real close knit communities to form.

In this sub many ppl blame ppl for overpaying for houses but most ppl just do what society, banks, governments, newspapers, everyone is telling them to do - to take out a max loan, put in a little bit more, then buy a house.

Leaving aside the bottom 25% or so and looking at how the middle class to upper ppl live in well off countries, like Europe and USA, nobody (hyperbole but still) has anywhere close to the debt ratio that so many Australians have. Australia has been a "lucky country" in many respects but that doesn't give Australia a magic exemption from debt.

Year 12 accounting will be enough to get you going. I would then suggest you focus on three themes:

(1) Financial statement analysis

(2) Valuation (https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/valuation-measuring-and-managing-the-value-of-companies)

(3) Strategy and competitive advantage (https://www.amazon.com/Competitive-Advantage-Creating-Sustaining-Performance/dp/0684841460/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1542540539&sr=8-1&keywords=Competitive+advantage+porter)

Really, there are heaps of books on these topics. Do your own research and find a few that appeal to you.

Read up on these three areas and you’ll know how to analyse companies.

To cur a long story short, Travis became a financial planner, started his own company, and has made enough money to quit at age 30 & now he's almost a doctor.

The moral is become a financial planner, not one of their customers!

http://www.amazon.com/Where-Are-Customers-Yachts-Street/dp/0471770892
The title refers to an ancient story (which the author finds is probably at least 100 years old by now) about a visitor to New York who admired the yachts that the bankers and brokers had in the harbor. Naively, he then asked where the customers' yachts were. Naturally, there were no customers' yachts.

https://www.amazon.com/Financial-Shenanigans-Accounting-Gimmicks-Reports/dp/0071703071

If you want to read about manipulating statements.