Learning path
Personal finance from zero
A guided sequence through the personal finance lessons on this site. Start at step one, work your way down, and you will end up with a coherent picture of how money works, why investing matters, and how to make it real in Italy. The lessons here are the spine; the calculators along the way let you plug in your own numbers.
- 1
Why this matters
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Set the stakes before any math. What money is, what it isn't, and why a 25-year-old today has to think about this stuff in a way their parents didn't.
- 2
Track and control your spending
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Before you optimize anything, you need to see the picture. Read your payslip honestly, build a real budget, and learn the one number that drives the rest of your financial life: savings rate.
- 3
Emergency fund and debt
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The defensive base. A few months of expenses in a place you can reach in 24 hours, and any high-interest debt killed before you start investing seriously.
- 4
Compound interest as the engine
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The single idea that makes long-term investing work. Inflation is the headwind, compound returns are the tailwind. Use the calculator to feel it on your own numbers.
Calculator Compound interest calculator - 5
Asset classes and ETFs
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What you can actually buy: stocks, bonds, the indices on top of them, and the cheap, transparent ETF wrappers that turned all of this into a couple of clicks.
- 6
Building a portfolio
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Allocation, diversification, and the academic case for why dollar-cost averaging is not magic but is fine. End with the actual click-by-click first investment.
- Asset allocation: the decision that matters most
- Diversification: what it is and what it isn't
- PAC vs lump-sum: the academic evidence
- How to actually start investing
- 7
Italian taxes for investors
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The 26% capital-gains rate, the softer 12.5% on government bonds, dividends, and the wrinkle of holding assets at a foreign broker. Boring, important, easy to get wrong.
- 8
Pension reality check
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What INPS will and will not pay. Why the supplementary pillar exists, how a fondo pensione is taxed differently, and what your real retirement gap looks like once the calculator does the math.
- The Italian pension system (INPS), plain words
- TFR: where your money quietly sits
- Fondi pensione aperti, chiusi, PIP
- 9
FIRE math
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Financial independence as an arithmetic problem. Different lifestyle tiers, the safe withdrawal-rate debate, and what your number actually has to be in Italy.
Calculator FIRE calculator - 10
Pulling it all together
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Two worked examples on the same family: Sofia at 28 with 37 years of compounding ahead, and Giorgio at 52 with 13 years and a different problem. Same principles, very different plans.