Alright Millennials, listen up – I am older than you and that means I am smarter than you so take a few minutes and soak up this old man’s knowledge bomb or I will put you into a choke hold and noogie you until you scream mercy.

Here’s an article by a millennial telling other millennials to “save” in Bitcoin. It’s an intriguing bit of advice that can be boiled down to this:

I get it. A lot of millennials feel priced out of this economy and they’re frustrated. But there’s no free lunch here. Let me explain.

Your savings is the residual of your unspent income. This is money you hold onto for some future need. For most of us it means we keep a small amount in savings to cover monthly expenses and then stockpile larger amounts to account for larger purchases in the future (a house, a car, a vacation, etc). And then you have your long-term savings which is basically your retirement stash.

Now, most of this savings needs to be pretty stable because life is unpredictable and you don’t want your savings to be so volatile that you can’t predict how you’ll be able to afford things in the future. But at the same time, you need to take some risk with your savings because you need it to beat the rate of inflation and grow over time. To visualize how assets can be applied to that you can see this scale:

In a general sense, stocks are instruments that protect you very well against the risk of purchasing power loss, but in the process of doing that they will also expose you to significant permanent loss risk at times. Cash, on the other hand, will protect you against the risk of permanent loss, but will also expose you to significant purchasing power loss over time. Bonds are kind of in the middle. When you’re saving money you need to build a portfolio that does a little bit of all of that. So it’s generally better not to be too far on either extreme.