Beginning the journey

Two years ago I was in the US visiting a friend for two weeks. My friend has a similar job that I have and about the same salary, but he is significantly older. I lived with him in his house by a small lake during my stay. We were also out by his cabin on an island in Canada. In addition, I had free access to one of his two snowmobiles throughout the stay. To me it was amazing that he had all this. He must be up over his head in debt, I thought.

I am curious so I asked. He then explained that when marrying his wife, they decided to live on one salary and to invest the other. To make a long story short, this meant that they had the money when an island was for sale; they could buy the house at the lake when the market crashed.

This was the big wake up call for me. I grew up in a home where I learned the value of money and working hard. No one learned about investments. To me the stock market was a way to lose your money. At the age of 31, I did not know what the yield was nor an index fund. Nobody had thought me how economics worked. During the following days I asked 1000 questions and my friend patiently told me how they had done.

When I returned to Sweden, I went straight to Amazon to buy 4 books on investment
(now, I had not started using the library yet). This was in February 2017. Today, the portfolio is worth about 90000 sek, but then you should know that I have since had a child and bought a home so I am quite satisfied with it.

How did you begin?