Now that I've decided to play poker full time for the foreseeable future, I've been able to get my head out of my ass and start doing smart and productive things instead of wondering what to do next. One of those smart and productive things is opening a brokerage account and "managing" it myself instead of leaving it in money market accounts/CDs/under my mattress. I put "managing" in quotes because if you just put money into index funds and mutual funds who's risk/return aligns with your interests, there really isn't any managing to do. I'm really glad a good friend of mine kept pestering me to do this. I was missing out on tons of free money because I'm a dumb idiot.
Learning how to save (beyond your bankroll) is very important for full time poker players because of the uncertainty and lack of good alternatives in the future that come with the job if you aren't making a LOT of money. Compound interest is really powerful, and its power decreases the longer you wait. If a 25 year-old starts putting $5,000/year into a relatively risky (which, long-term, really isn't that risky) account earning 10%/year, they end up with $822,470.11 when they're 55 years old. If the 25 year-old is able to just throw $50,000 into that account and never touches it and never saves anything else, it will be worth $872,470.11 in 30 years.
In other news, I just passed 500 hours of live poker played since I graduated May 20th, working out to almost 40 hours/week. 500 hours at 25 hands/hour works out to 12,515 hands, which is about the same amount of hands I would play per week when I was playing online full-time. of course my $/hand is much higher live, and it's easier to put in more hours live, but still. lolive.
