This is not financial advise

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This is not financial advise, it is a part of my story and I am writing this to hopefully help other people with a similar situation. It all started when I saw my bank account after a month of hard work and saw that it had gone negative again, and wondering if I did I not make enough or am I spending to much? So I ran the numbers and you know what I found? My savings, financial or investing knowledge was non existant to be generous. I thought how do the wealthy invest their money? Or better yet how do they always make more from those investments yet I stay broke? I had no Idea how or what they did but I was determined to find out and become successful like them and have enough to cover my own retirement many times over.  I knew one thing for sure, no matter how much I made I never had anything left at the end of the month. So I knew I needed to study but what do I study and where do I start? I also needed to pay the bills while doing all of this. Even though I realized a change in career without a college education would be difficult, it had to be done.  So I spoke with a friend of mine and told him my situation before I did anything and he told me if I want to start investing successfully then I had a lot of work to do. I Asked him "I have $1000 to invest what should I invest in?" He said you won't like the answer but if you really want to learn how to invest successfully start by investing in "YOURSELF" read, take courses, & teach yourself, so I knew I had to change my mindset just to understand how money works how it moves and how to make it work for me effectivelly. So I took a minimum wage job that was mainly physical labor that would allow me to listen to books on tape about investing while making enough to figure out what I wanted to make my new career. What I did know Is I needed to learn about money, a subject I thought I knew.  But boy was I wrong!  So I worked & listened to book after book, rich dad poor dad by robert kiosaki... beat the street by peter lynch and many others.. I learned "intrinsic value" and value investing from warren buffet.  So months of this went on and on i'd go to work listen to finance news then at work listen to 3-4 books on tape and listen to one more on my way home. Then when I got home Id study a website called investopedia and it didnt stop there, Id watch youtube for tutorials and documentaries anything I could do to learn more about the past as well as current & going into the future. It got to the point where I was staying awake for 2-3 days at a time just to catch up on all the years of Information and lessons that ive missed. I dont recomend this style of study and in no way do I believe it is healthy but I had to understand all of it and at the time I really didnt know any better, I was just so happy to find the answers to my financial problems. Looking back If I could I would tell myself to take my time and learn while you enjoy the process.  Anyways back to the point, learning the game is important if you want to win! So Learn I did. I was doing this for 12 months before I even considered trading and chose to play it safe and start with paper trading which is fake money but allows you to learn how to invest without any downside. I figured if I could double or triple what they gave me in the paper trading account then i would be closer to being ready to use real money. I did and finally realised I had invested in myself and learned the game, its rules, the players, & all of the rest of the components of a wealthy persons success and could now duplicate it. But what I was duplicating was only a fraction of what I will ultimately learn in the long term but for a beginner lets just say I wasnt average.   When I realized I was onto something I started buying dividend stocks trying to live off cash flow from $1000 definately meant I was a little dillusional to say the least. But I would soon learn this. I ran the numbers of how much stock i would need to make $2000 per month and it was close to 1.4m to recieve that much per month in dividends. And I didnt have that kind of money so it was back to the drawing board. Instead of investing for cash flowing dividend stocks I had to change my approach I needed more growth faster. So I started looking into value investing. Finding a stock with an intrinsic value of $20 for $8 is my kind of deal! So I would hunt for stocks or companies that were highly undervalued and buy at the bottom and sell at the top. This worked so well I thought I was set but then I learned about PDT and also IRS play a big role in how you plan on investing. Back to the drawing board again. It was now that I studied my tush off learning the laws and regulations put in place to protect us as well as mostly them. But an important step to take in the process. So it was about this time I stumbled onto crypto... I saw growth like you would not beleive. So I got into that. I could trade 24/7 and the percentages of growth in comparison to the stock market on its best day is like a grain of sand vs every damn beach on the planet. I turned $1500 into $14,000 on Shiba Inu alone in 2 years. You show me returns like that in the stock market anytime in its history... dont wory ill wait... you wont. This is not a brag or saying I love crypto this is mearly to show you the different types of investments give you different risk levels as well as different opportunities for growth or problems.   Do your own research and learn daily about how to preserve, grow your wealth. Never stop growing.