No joking around, this is good IRL advice!
I want to do one of, if not both of the latter (really don't want to be saddled with student loan debt, especially given how things are in the world right now). I have always been fascinated with electronics and have always wanted to do something super niche with some devices I own, but not having the skills, tools, experience, or someone to learn from isn't exactly helping my case in that regard.
I don't know for sure about investing in real estate specifically, but I guess, thanks to that situation with the GameStop stock, apparently, people are expecting physical silver/gold to become super valuable soon? I've always been curious about investing, but wasn't super interested until recently, and even then, I still kind of want to build up my savings to at least what they were before I tried to return to college to get my bachelor's in 2018-2019 before that crashed and burned. And then, there's the fact that I've been wanting to move out of my parents' house for a while, and that just complicates matters even further.
Internet can teach you much about electronics, and there is usually enough junk around to learn to solder on. Get working device, desolder part, replace/resolder and make sure it still works. Scratch a trace and learn to do a jumper wire for when you encounter that (I like both major schools of thought -- tweezers and small wire vs long wire you solder one end for, usually the one that is not the tip of the wire, then another and then snip). Blob some solder down the pins of a chip and then get rid of it.
Equally not everybody starts out able to diagnose a design fault that only manifests under certain conditions or be able to infer what things should be from design principles and baseline physics. You tend to start off changing fuses and doing the oh so rare and hard to come by skill of reading the manual and following its diagnostic procedures (or maybe just setup procedures). Maybe then soldering some capacitors, possibly even scoring an ESR meter.
Maybe then you will get some diagnostics manuals and checking the voltages it says to measure, resistances it says to measure, checking continuity... repeating for another when you get an oscilloscope so you can see if it is doing the specified turn on and do what it needs to do sequence. Firing the parts cannon is crude but if I am not spending 10 hours (and charging for it) to get the same result (customer's device works again/gets data retrieved/...) then yeah.
Visual inspection will be in there somewhere too -- burn marks, broken traces, signs of heat, signs of PCB flex.
Somewhere along the line you will get to the point where you reach "beyond economical repair", maybe increased skills will push it a bit but you get to learn where that is. Maybe you will specialise a bit more, have some replacement parts to test with or design your own fault flow charts/baseline (quite nice to have a working example of a product right next to you to compare measurements), and maybe then you start to get the general design flow (engineering is all about doing as little as possible -- if the circuit works one year then the next model will probably use something very much like it). There are even those that will share their notes.
Equally soldering iron, hot air station, solder, flux, handful of basic components*, multimeter (or 4**), oscilloscope***, screwdrivers, solder braid/wick, solder pump, voltage source, maybe signal generator are all quite doable as a hobbyist type deal rather than investing thousands, and soldering iron, solder, screwdrivers, snips and multimeter is a good start that will solve many problems for many people and probably live in a briefcase too. Full bore IR BGA rework, the fancy heated ultrasonic cleaners, fancy mantis microscopes, logic analysers (assuming your scope does not have the functionality)... that can come later.
*choice video, you might already know it but for the sake of others watching
+plus basic surface mount versions of those.
**voltage in, voltage out, current in, current out. One for each. Solves a lot of issues knowing all at once and relative variations.
***do also know
Real estate is a fun one. Sure if you look at a price of rent and price of property line then for many years it tends to go one way. However between taxes, interest in loans, repair and maintenance it is not necessarily an easy game.
Gold and silver also have nice lines associated with graphs, possibly even beating inflation. Never quite sure why (both have limited practical applications, can't be eaten) but human like shiny I guess and that has held for thousands of years.
