Jump in!

I found this article interesting: http://lifehacker.com/move-before-you-re-ready-get-started-without-being-an-1654826130

Learning skills as you need them can increase both your motivation to learn the material (because you need it now!) and your engagement with the subject material. This increased motivation and engagement can lead to a deeper, richer understanding--and a quicker acquisition of that deeper, richer understanding!

This flies in the face of the advice that you usually hear about planning ahead and learning everything about a subject before doing it--but such advice does not account for constraints of time, motivation, and cognitive ability. This advice to "jump in and learn on the fly" does.

How does this apply to personal finance? Well, I'm a big proponent of keeping things simple. So, if you start out keeping your budget (and your investments) as simple as possible, and only learn about new things when they come up, you'll be more likely to actually accomplish something (rather than putting it off for a day...or a year). And who wouldn't like to accomplish more?!

Definitely an interesting idea, and a great read!