I was watching this show today where this financial management person tried to help a lady get her finances back in track as she has accumulated massive debt. As well, she had already declared personal bankruptcy which didn’t seem to help her fix her habits of spending more than she makes. The interesting was that she was an artist and she spent thousands of dollars a month in training for her craft which was one of large expenses. At the same time it was like she was making less than five figures a year too.
While it is not the most popular option, going for the hands on experience route can make sense in many ways. For example, I know a lot of people who couldn’t afford to pay say $20,000 to try and learn the technical skills to do various creative work. Instead, they just worked non stop creating things in order to increase their skills while making their portfolio bigger. Sure enough, eventually they tried volunteering for various projects to get more experience and eventually they just got so good at it that they were able to start charging people for their service.
Of course if you could afford it then training is probably the more efficient way to do it. But if you are really that broke then doing it the old fashion way of trial and error in teaching yourself can make more sense financially.