Start Here — seven steps before your first purchase
The short version. Do these in order.
This is the index card version of everything else in the library. None of it involves buying anything, and it is deliberately ordered: each step is easier if the one above it is already done.
The thirty-day practice run in step four is the step people skip and the step that does the most work. Writing down what you would have bought, without buying it, is the cheapest possible way to find out how you behave when a number moves — and how you behave is the variable that decides most outcomes.
- Write your purpose and horizon. What is this money for, and when would you need it back? One sentence each.
- Set a boundary and a rhythm. What share of your investing is this allowed to be, starting small, and how often will you contribute?
- Draft a one-paragraph process. Simple enough to follow on a bad day, or it is not a process.
- Begin the thirty-day notebook practice. One line a week, no money moving. See the Practice Pack.
- Keep an emotion log and do a five-minute weekly review. Cheap, dull, and the only honest record of how you actually behaved.
- Define your guardrails if you plan to explore. Optional, and only after the thirty days. See the Guardrails Pack.
- Check what leaving would cost before you need to leave. Exit friction is invisible until it matters. The Sellability tool will price it for a real position.
Print this, or duplicate it into whatever you already use. It is not worth a new app.
What is deliberately not on this list
Nothing here tells you what to buy, when to buy it, or how much it will be worth. That is not modesty — those questions do not have answers that anyone can give you honestly, and a checklist that pretended otherwise would be worth less than no checklist at all.
Nothing here, or anywhere else on this site, will ever ask for your seed phrase or private key. If any page, person or app asks you to type one in to "verify", "sync", "migrate" or "recover" a wallet, that is the whole scam and there are no exceptions to it.
Where to go next
Educational content, not financial advice. This worksheet structures a decision; it does not make one, and nothing in it is a recommendation to buy anything. We are not a broker, exchange, custodian or adviser, and we never take custody of your assets. We will never ask for a seed phrase or private key. See the full disclaimer.