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The millennial architects of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal appear to be drawing inspiration from the old mantra of their generation’s most iconic company: “Move fast and break things.”

That company, Facebook, has connected about a third of the world’s population in just over a decade. The insurgent political movement behind Ocasio-Cortez has something more ambitious in mind: remaking the planet’s largest economy in order to save the world from climate change.

As the the progressives begin to release the early sketches of their plan to create a zero-carbon economy, some policymakers and researchers worry the Green New Deal will literally break things. The concern is that Ocasio-Cortez’s plan to achieve climate goals in just 10 years will not only tee up defeat but unleash disruptions and unintended consequences that reverberate from U.S. power markets to Central African mines.

In one possible scenario, a rapid transition creates vulnerabilities in the system that leave the nation exposed to power shortages during times of peak demand, like last week’s polar vortex. While conservatives have long evoked rolling blackouts as a bogeyman in the debate over renewable power, energy researchers do express concern about the time frame for achieving Ocasio-Cortez’s goals.

“From a vantage point like mine, they’re certainly outside the realm of what is achievable, and I’m not sure that by putting those proposals forth, we’re actually really moving the ball forward for the agenda,” said Francis O’Sullivan, head of research at the MIT Energy Initiative.

A Green New Deal would mobilize the nation’s capital — its money, manpower and know-how — to advance clean tech and overhaul the American energy and transportation sectors. The goal is to drive carbon dioxide and other greenhouse-gas emissions to zero and prevent the potentially catastrophic impacts of climate change.

Ocasio-Cortez and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party are the latest advocates for such a plan. Their vision also strives to achieve economic justice with proposals like a federal jobs guarantee, basic income and universal health care. Ocasio-Cortez and Democratic Sen. Edward Markey are expected to introduce legislation into both chambers of Congress to move the plan forward soon.

The progressive coalition has yet to propose policies to reach this clean energy future, and Ocasio-Cortez has only floated ideas for how to pay for it — including a charge on carbon emissions and a 70 percent marginal tax rate for wealthy Americans. However, the coalition has set broad, ambitious goals:

• Generate 100 percent of the nation’s electric power from renewable sources.
• Build a national, energy-efficient “smart” electric power grid.
• Upgrade every residential and industrial building for energy efficiency.
• Eliminate greenhouse-gas emissions from the transportation sector, as well as from farms, factories and other industries.
• Fund “massive” investment, and make the U.S. a leading exporter of clean-tech products and services.

In her proposal to establish a House select committee, Ocasio-Cortez said she wants to hit the targets within 10 years of passing legislation authorizing a Green New Deal.

To be sure, the goals are not promises, said Demond Drummer, executive director at New Consensus, the think tank charged with fleshing out the deal and other progressive policies.

“We’re not promising anything. We’re setting a goal,” he said. “We’re setting a goal, and we’re going to get there.”

“Ten years is the statement. It really communicates we need to take bold, aggressive action.”

Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s office declined to make the Congress member or an aide available for this story and did not respond to written questions.

Policies aimed at achieving zero emissions have historically targeted mid-century for two reasons, according to Dr. Noah Kaufman, who studied pathways to decarbonization on the White House Council on Environmental Quality under President Barack Obama.

First, climate scientists generally believe cutting emissions by 80 percent to 100 percent by 2050 would allow nations to collectively prevent global temperatures from rising above 2 degrees Celsius by 2100, the headline goal of the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Beyond that threshold, climate scientists warn the impacts of global warming grow less predictable and perhaps exponentially more devastating.

Second, a longer timeline allows reductions to occur without major disruptions to the way companies and citizens go about their business. The 10-year target for Ocasio-Cortez’s goal, for example, would force utilities to shut down natural gas plants long before their useful life is over, said Kaufman, now a research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.

Drummer confirms the Green New Deal would phase out all fossil fuel and nuclear plants, though he said it would be done “responsibly and justly.”

“The reason why we think it’s worth looking into is because the science says we actually don’t have 10 years. The science says this should have happened 10 years ago from yesterday,” Drummer said.

Drummer points to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recent warning that “unprecedented changes” are necessary to meet the more ambitious goal of holding global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The world is on pace to exceed that level as soon as 2030, the Nobel Prize-winning panel composed of climate scientists said.

Policymakers and scholars tell CNBC a broad, overarching strategy to combat climate change is necessary, and they welcome the attention that Ocasio-Cortez has brought to the issue.

Kaufman does not doubt the nation could drive emissions close to zero in 10 or 20 years, provided the United States treats climate change as a national emergency and reaches political consensus. However, he and others warn that a sudden, rapid transition could create problems that undermine green goals.

“Looking at something like 10 years, it’s not a lot of time to look around at what’s going on and react to it,” Kaufman said. “If you give yourself a little more time, you have more opportunity to see what’s working and make tweaks to make sure you’re on the right path and accomplishing your policy objectives.”

Currently, only some parts of the country, like California and Texas, are seeing renewables go from playing a marginal role in the power system to a meaningful role, said O’Sullivan, the MIT researcher.

“The idea of a wind and solar future — 100 percent in 10 years’ time — that’s a really big stretch in many places. A very considerably cleaner system in 10 years’ time, now that’s much more realistic in regions where you have some hydro, aggressive additional buildup of wind and solar and quite a bit of nuclear hanging out as well.”

Renewable-energy sources generated 17 percent of the country’s electric power in 2017, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Hydropower accounted for 7.4 percent, followed by wind at 6.4 percent. Solar contributed just 1.3 percent.

Meanwhile, nuclear power plants generated 20 percent of the nation’s electric power and 63 percent of its zero-carbon power.

Scaling up wind and solar power would require replacing hundreds of thousands of miles of transmission and distribution lines with high voltage wire, in addition to outfitting the infrastructure with sensors to create a smart grid.

O’Sullivan said the United States is “nowhere near” implementing a national smart grid, and he is skeptical the country could stand one up in 10 years. Building out that infrastructure is a tortuous process that entails navigating a thicket of stakeholders, from local landowners to federal regulators.

In 2011 the Electric Power Research Institute estimated the cost of a national smart grid, including storage, at $338 billion to $476 billion. EPRI said the grid would create $1.3 trillion to $2 trillion in economic benefits and cut emissions by nearly 60 percent from 2005 levels. EPRI is mostly funded by utilities.

Even at today’s modest levels, rapid deployment of renewables has created technical and market complications, said O’Sullivan. California solar and wind farms have curtailed large amounts of supply because they were generating more power than could be used or stored at times. The spike in renewable power also drove prices down to levels that create problems in power markets.

These complexities “are surmountable, but they are not surmountable in unrealistic time frames — in time frames that just do not mesh with the overall inertia of the system,” O’Sullivan said.

The Green New Deal also requires installing systems to store energy when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine.

The United States currently has 1.4 Gw of installed energy battery storage capacity, and it’s on pace to grow that capacity to 4 Gw by 2023, according to energy research firm Wood Mackenzie. That pencils out to 3 percent to 4 percent of the electric power the nation can generate.

“There is no solution for 100 percent renewable that doesn’t require massive amounts of storage,” said Daniel Finn-Foley, senior energy storage analyst at Wood Mackenzie Power and Renewables.

That’s where the Green New Deal’s vision for electric power intersects with its transportation sector goal — replacing all internal combustion engine vehicles with electric vehicles. The dominant technology behind both EVs and electric power storage is lithium-ion batteries.

Wood Mackenzie forecasts that under current conditions, annual electric vehicle sales will reach 2.9 million by 2030, accounting for 16 percent of all lightweight vehicles sold in the United States.

Getting to 100 percent around 2030 would be a “huge” jump, and one that raises serious geopolitical, humanitarian and environmental concerns, said Ravi Manghani, director of storage research at Wood Mackenzie Power and Renewables.

That’s because lithium-ion batteries rely on rare earths like cobalt.

There are serious concerns about the environmental impacts on lithium-producing nations. Meanwhile, more than half of the world’s cobalt supply comes from Democratic Republic of Congo, a central African nation with a record of instability and a history of child labor in the mining industry.

Lifting EV sales from 16 percent to 100 percent by 2030 would require a roughly five- to sixfold increase in mining, Manghani said. He is concerned that a huge surge in demand over a short period could incentivize environmental and labor abuses and even tip DRC further into instability.

One solution is to prioritize new battery technologies that use less cobalt, and certainly, the Green New Deal calls for mobilizing the nation on a scale similar to World War II and the Space Race to accelerate innovation.

Still, Drummer acknowledges that some technologies, like zero-carbon airplanes, are unlikely to emerge at commercial scale over the next decade.

“That may take 50 years, but the point is, we’ve got to try,” Drummer said. “We’re not moving currently with the urgency we need to be moving to actually address this existential threat.”

He added: “The unintended consequence of moving fast must be weighed with the known consequences of not moving fast enough.”

It’s easy to get swept up in the romance of Valentine’s Day. Yet, all the heart-shaped chocolate in the world can’t make love last.

What’s more defining is your financial compatibility, studies show.

The vast majority of those in a recent poll said substantial credit card debt is a turnoff and bad credit, in general, is a red flag, according to WalletHub.

More than a third, or 38 percent, of adults would not date someone with bad credit, WalletHub found. And more than half, or 53 percent, of those surveyed would not marry someone with bad credit. WalletHub polled more than 700 adults at the end of January.

According to a separate Finder.com study, 72 percent of Americans would reconsider a romantic relationship if the person had unsettled debt, particularly from credit cards.

“While debt is undoubtedly a turnoff, not all debts are viewed as equally unappealing,” said Finder’s consumer advocate Jennifer McDermott. “For example, credit card debt is the No. 1 debt deal breaker, but only around the $12,000 mark, meaning those with small amounts owed might still pass muster.”

Still, “singles with unsettled loans might want to sort out their balance sheets before hitting the dating scene,” she added.

In fact, the higher your credit score when a committed relationship starts, the less likely you are to break up after the first few years, according to research by the Federal Reserve Board. Well-matched credit scores also bode well for a long-lasting love.

Credit scores reveal an individual’s relationship skill and level of commitment, the report concluded.

Those with the highest credit scores were most likely to form long-lasting committed relationships, the study showed. And the greater the mismatch between a couple’s credit scores, the more likely they are to separate within the first five years.

“This result arises, in part, because initial credit scores and match quality predict subsequent credit usage and financial distress, which in turn are correlated with relationship dissolution,” the Federal Reserve Board’s report said.

Couples with poorly matched scores may face challenges in jointly managing household finances, such as managing debt, paying bills or saving for a rainy day fund, particularly in their first few years together, according to the report.

With money at the root of a lot of relationship issues, it’s no surprise that a date with credit problems doesn’t bode well.

However, “not everybody walks out of college with a six-figure income,” said Jay Ferrans, the president of JM Financial & Accounting Services in Southfield, Michigan. It’s more important to demonstrate fiscal responsibility and communicate your long-term goals, he added.

Above all else, “be honest,” Ferrans said. “Financial secrets are a great way to torpedo any relationship.”

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The Federal Reserve is likely to hold interest rates steady for the entire year after hiking four times in 2018, predicted economist Mohamed El-Erian.

El-Erian, the chief economic advisor at Allianz and former Pimco chief, told CNBC Tuesday that he sees a 50 percent to 55 percent chance of the next Fed move being a cut that would happen sometime in 2020. Back in December, the Fed had projected two rate increases this year. But few in the market still expect that path.

And another tool to tighten-up monetary policy, the unwinding of the Fed’s balance sheet, or portfolio of assets, “certainly will go off autopilot” in 2019, El-Erian said on “Squawk Box.”

The central bank is aiming to reduce its more than $4 trillion worth of bond holdings by up to $600 billion this year by not replacing maturing assets.

El-Erian thinks that balance sheet plan will be altered. “It will alter it both the notion of the destination and the pace.” He refused to the put numbers on the destination, saying its data dependent.

On the matter of Fed Chairman Jerome Powell having dinner Monday evening with President Donald Trump, El-Erian said, “It was really important that this happened this week, and not last week” before the central bank’s January policy meeting. “Had it happened before the pivot, we would be having a completely different conversation,” he added.

El-Erian said that Fed chiefs meeting with presidents is normal and has happened plenty of times before. For example, Trump met with Powell’s predecessor Janet Yellen in October 2017. When Barack Obama was in the White House, he met with Yellen in April 2016 and November 2014.

Trump, who nominated Powell to be Fed chairman, has been one of Powell’s biggest and most vocal critics, blaming central bank rate increases for slowing the economy and roiling the stock market.

“I always feel it’s important for two sides to hear each other and it reduces, but it doesn’t eliminate, but reduces misunderstandings in the future,” El-Erian. “I think net-net this is neutral to slightly favorable to the market. But it’s not a big deal.”

Meanwhile, El-Erian gives Powell a grade of “A,” saying anyone would have had troubling navigating the current economic and market conditions. Though he did call Powell’s early October signal of four rate hikes for 2019 a mistake.

Powell did walk back those comments but the stock market plunged in the final three months of the year, hitting a closing low on Christmas Eve and a bear market decline of more than 20 percent from its record highs. Wall Street has staged a recovery since then, with January posting the best month of gains in stocks since October 2015.

El-Erian said Powell’s proclamation after last week’s Fed meeting of patience before any more rate moves reinforced the case to buy stocks — “expected return goes up, expected volatility goes down.”

“It played on expectations that liquidity would be accommodated, if needed. And therefore, you can be more comfortable going back to the old view … look at dips as perhaps buying opportunities,” he added.

Once upon a time, Silicon Valley start-ups were afraid of Microsoft, or scorned it as irrelevant.

That’s changed under Satya Nadella, according to investor Ben Horowitz, whose firm Andreessen Horowitz just co-invested alongside Microsoft in Databricks, a start-up with software for processing large-scale data inpublic clouds.

Microsoft is “truly an outstandingly good partner, which is really an amazing thing, just because if you go back to the ’90s, Microsoft didn’t have that reputation,” Horowitz said.

In the old days, there were two things that made Microsoft difficult to partner with, Horowitz said. Anything the company did had to promote Windows. Also, he said, “it was always scary to introduce a company to them [Microsoft] because it always felt like they were going to use information against you.”

In addition to changing the company’s track record there, Nadella has also rebuilt the company’s bench of product leaders after it emptied out under Ballmer, Horowitz said.

The relationship between Databricks and Microsoft dates to 2016, when Horowitz sent an email about the company to Nadella.

Nadella grasped the importance of having data in the same place as the software that will process it, and his team understood how well it could handle lots of different kinds of data, Horowitz said.

“You have to just give him credit for seeing it,” Horowitz said.

Microsoft employees then did the work to make sure that the Databricks software, which draws on the Apache Spark open-source project, works well with Azure, and got its salespeople prepared to sell the technology.

The resulting collaboration was one-of-a-kind — Microsoft offers a cloud service with “Databricks” in the name, but Databricks is the one that’s running it, said Databricks’ CEO, Ali Ghodsi.

Sometime in the second half of 2018 — Ghodsi wouldn’t say exactly when — he had dinner at Nadella’s house. He came away as impressed as Horowitz.

“He said, ‘As a leader, you need to create clarity.’ I think he’s created a lot of clarity at Microsoft,” Ghodsi said of Nadella. “He’s really, really customer-obsessed, and he really believes in the cloud, and he’s a great leader.”

Ghodsi and the Databricks board recognized what Microsoft had already contributed and decided to give Microsoft a chance to invest in the latest round, Horowitz said.

The new investment, which is an unspecified portion of a $250 million round, exemplifies Microsoft’s increased focus on commercializing open-source software. In addition to making some of its technology compatible with the Linux operating system, which competes with Windows, Microsoft has also tapped other companies and made acquisitions in recent years to bolster its collection of developer tools that are compatible with open-source code.

Microsoft has previously partnered with open-source companies like Docker and Hortonworks in its efforts to compete with cloud market leader Amazon Web Services.

In January, Microsoft announced the acquisition of Citus Data, a company focusing on the PostgreSQL open-source database software, and in 2017 it bought the Deis team and technology, partly with an eye toward improving Azure’s capabilities with software containers.

San Francisco-based Databricks claims more than 2,000 customers, including HP and Shell. The new round values the company at $2.7 billion. Coatue Management, Battery Ventures, Green Bay Ventures, Geodesic and New Enterprise Associates also participated in the new round alongside Microsoft and Andreessen Horowitz.

WATCH: Satya Nadella has been tactically more impressive than Apple CEO Tim Cook, says portfolio manager

You’ve just landed a coveted job at a new company and the hiring manager presents the organization’s offer for your starting salary.

Do you accept the given number or negotiate for higher pay?

The prevailing wisdom says you should negotiate, but according to bestselling management author and CNBC contributor Suzy Welch, the prevailing wisdom is wrong.

“I know not everyone’s going to agree on my advice on this,” she says, “but here’s the advice I give my own kids: If the salary is within 10 to 15 percent of what you had in your head, say, ‘Yes, thank you. I’m excited. I can’t wait.’”

Waiting, she says, will pay off in the long run.

Data shows women negotiate less often than men, and earn less money as a result. But Welch says that asking for a raise at the start could come across as greedy, and Harvard research underscores that women are particularly vulnerable to this scrutiny.

“You want to walk in as a team player and be the person who believes that pay comes with performance,” Welch says.

Failing to do so can hurt your career. One woman who Welch describes as “talented” pushed for a 3 percent raise when starting at a new company. But she struggled to settle in and sensed that people were “cold to her in meetings.”

“It wasn’t worth it,” Welch says. Waiting for a raise isn’t just to avoid backlash. It’s also strategic, and “positions you perfectly for asking and getting a significant raise after you’ve done great work.”

Instead of asking for more money to begin with, Welch says you should set up a meeting with your boss six months into the new role. Be sure to emphasize your shared goals and how you’ve contributed to the team’s success. Explain how you’ve not only succeeded but over-delivered. Then say, “I hope that will be recognized in my compensation.”

Holding off several months gives you that extra time to show your boss that you recognize pay is performance-driven, as well as build your case for getting a raise. You’ll be more likely to get a larger raise, too.

“Go in with good will, do a great job,” she says, “and in the long run — and usually in the short run too — you’ll see the real reward.”

Suzy Welch is the co-founder of the Jack Welch Management Instituteand a noted business journalist, TV commentator and public speaker. If you have questions about your own career, email her at gettowork@cnbc.com.

Video by Mary Stevens.

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Hungry for credit card rewards? You might want to make a reservation.

More banks are offering rewards for dining out than ever before, said Julian Mark Kheel, senior analyst at The Points Guy. “The competition to reward credit card users with bonuses at restaurants has become fierce in recent years,” he said.

The trend was set off by Uber in 2017, when it launched its Visa card with 4 percent cash back on dining, said Ted Rossman, an industry analyst at Creditcards.com.

“Then things really heated up in the second half of 2018,” he said.

Capital One raised the dining rewards ante on its Savor card to 4 percent cash back, from 3 percent. Shortly after, American Express lifted the dining rewards on its Gold card to 4 points per dollar, from 2 points.

Later this month, people can apply for the Citi Prestige card, which will grant 5 points per dollar spent at restaurants.

“Dining out a lot suggests a more affluent lifestyle and a higher level of spending that the issuers want a piece of,” Rossman said.

Americans are spending more on eating out: In 2017, the average expenditures on “food away from home” was $3,365, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s up from $3,154 in 2016 and $3,008 in 2015.

A number of websites rank cards with the best dining rewards, including CNBC Make It.

To avoid being charged any interest, only put expenses on your card that you’ll be able to pay off each month, especially since rates are at historic highs.

And these cards make most sense if you already eat out with some frequency, said Matt Schulz, chief industry analyst at Comparecards.com. “The last thing anyone should ever do is overspend just to get credit card rewards,” he said.

Before you apply for a card, figure out what the fees will be, Schulz said. The Amex Gold card comes with an annual $250 charge and the Citi Prestige costs $495 a year, while the Capital One Savor card is free the first year, and $95 after that. The Uber Visa card has no fee. “Take the time to do the math and make sure you understand what you’re getting into,” he said.

For those who are looking for a “solid, inexpensive” card, Kheel recommends the Chase Sapphire Preferred. Users will get extra points at restaurants, breweries and cafes.

You’ll also want to consider how you want to spend your rewards, Rossman said. The Uber Visa and Capital One Savor cards are cash-back, whereas the points you pick up on the Amex Gold or Citi Prestige cards can be transferred to redeem free flights and hotel stays.

Sign-up bonuses vary, too, and are worth factoring into your card decision, Rossman said. The Citi Prestige card comes with 50,000 points, which is worth $500 in travel. Capital One Savor will get you $500 cash back.

If you’re wondering what counts as “dining,” there’s a helpful breakdown of the different rules on The Points Guy website.

For example, Chase includes establishments “whose primary business is sit-down or eat-in dining,” and therefore your dinner at a hotel or casino may not count.

Some banks “count delivery services such as Seamless and Grubhub as dining purchases,” Kheel said, “meaning you can earn bonus points even if you never step foot in the restaurant.”

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On January 30, music power couple Beyonce and Jay-Z announced that one lucky fan could win a free concert ticket a year for the next 30 years — or, as Beyonce put it, “for life.”

The catch? You have to adopt a plant-based diet.

The A-listers have teamed up with the Greenprint Project, a venture created by Beyonce’s trainer Marco Borges, which encourages people to reduce their environmental impact by cutting back on animal products. The website focuses on the idea that even small changes can make a large impact.

Beyonce publicized the contest on Instagram, writing, “Click the link in my bio for a chance to win tickets to any JAY and/or my shows for life. #greenprintproject.” She shared a link to the Greenprint Project and declared her commitment to meatless Mondays and eating plant-based breakfasts.

“We want to challenge you, as we challenge ourselves, to move toward plant-based foods,” the Carters wrote in the introduction to Borges’ book, “The Greenprint: Plant-Based Diet, Best Body, Better World,” adding, “We all have a responsibility to stand up for our health and the health of the planet.”

Science backs up the project’s mission. What people eat directly affects climate change, a study published in Nature found. In order to keep global warming under 2 degrees Celsius, people around the world would need to eat a lot less meat. (Temperatures are already up 1 degree above pre-industrial levels and are on track to go up a disastrous 3 to 5 degrees if no changes are made.)

Greenhouse gas, or GHG, emissions “cannot be sufficiently mitigated without dietary changes towards more plant-based diets,” the study says.

In other words, Beyonce is on to something: Changing what you consume could actually be the most important thing you do, researchers found, since “dietary change contributes the most to the reductions in GHG emissions.”

Although the Greenprint website encourages contestants to adopt a plant-based diet, the sweepstakes itself seems to be based on the honor system. Your deadline to enter is April 22, and a winner will be chosen at random on May 22.

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Don’t miss: The 15 most difficult places to buy a home in the US

Being rich is not a function of the number on your paycheck.

So says Scott Galloway, a serial entrepreneur who sold his company L2, Inc., reportedly for over $130 million.

“What’s the definition of rich? The definition of rich is having passive income that’s greater than your burn,” says Galloway, or spending less than you make.

Galloway says his dad and stepmother are the perfect example: Collectively, they take in $48,000 per year from social security payments and their pensions, he says.

“They spend 40 [thousand dollars per year]. They are rich. they have more money than they need without having to leave the house and work,” Galloway told CNBC Make It in September.

Meanwhile, Galloway says people making millions can be “poor” if their expenses are high enough.

“I also have friends here in New York who make between $1 [million] and $3 million a year as investment bankers or partners at a law firm,” Galloway says — incomes which would put them in the top 1 percent of all wage-earners in the US, according to an October 2018 report from the Economic Policy Institute.

But says Galloway, “between the alimony to their ex-wife, their house in the Hamptons, their fat co-op on the Upper West Side [of Manhattan] and private school tuition, they may make $2 million but they spend [$]2.1 million — they are poor because they have the stress of knowing if there’s a hiccup in the economy or they lose their job there are deep s—,” Galloway says.

The upshot: Bringing in a lot of money doesn’t make you “rich” if you spend more than you earn and you depend on a salary.

So advises Galloway, “Focus on your burn. And have an honest conversation with yourself around how do you get to a point of true wealth and being rich — and that is getting to a point where with passive income from rental properties from [stock] dividends from some sort of a pension from the money you make from stocks — that at some point that will be greater than your burn.”

At the same time, don’t let your spending grow along with your earnings, tempting though it may be.

“It’s also easy to fall into the trap of believing that I will spend to my income because as I get older I get more and more awesome and make more money,” says Galloway, who is also a professor of marketing at NYU Stern School of Business. “Children focus on their earnings. Adults also focus on the other side of the ledger — and that is their burn.”

The key, says Galloway, is to starting putting a bit away every month when you are young.

“So how do you increase the likelihood that you’ll be a millionaire and have economic security at some point? Most of us when we are younger believe that we’re going to have the big win, we’re going to hit a home run and have a big liquidity event. But again assume that won’t happen,” says Galloway.

So “pay yourself first every month. Force yourself to save a little bit of money. Saving a little bit of money at a young age goes a long, long way in case you don’t have that big liquidity event,” says Galloway.

“The one thing I can promise you is that time will go faster than you think, and savings will compound faster than you think. So it’s hard and I’m not saying that this is something that most people have the discipline to do, but the people that have the discipline to every month put a little bit away and start focusing on creating passive income are the ones that are going to be rich you know no matter or not whether they have that big hit.”

— Video by Claire Nolan

See also:

This self-made millionaire says not all masculinity is toxic

Self-made millionaire: 3 things you need to do to be successful, happy and wealthy by age 30

Sam Adams founder: Unless you’re a sociopath, being happy is better than being rich

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So you’re getting started in the investing world and keep seeing mutual funds and exchange-traded funds as options. What’s the difference, you wonder. And does it matter?

While there are similarities between the two, the differences could determine whether one or the other (or a mix) makes the most sense for you.

“It’s very important to understand the differences between them,” said Frank McAleer, senior vice president of wealth, retirement and portfolio solutions at Raymond James. “How you use them depends on your investing time frame, your goals, your financial plan — there are a lot of considerations.”

Here’s a look at the key differences between ETFs and traditional mutual funds to help you decide how either or both might fit into your investment strategy.

Both are essentially pools of money in which investors buy shares. The funds invest their assets in stocks or bonds (or both) or other types of investments (i.e., commodities such as gold or silver), depending on the fund’s objective.

Many traditional mutual funds are actively managed, meaning investment experts are at the helm choosing where to invest a fund’s assets.

Other mutual funds are passively managed funds. That is, their holdings mimic those of an index, such as the S&P 500, instead of having someone handpicking the investments.

On the ETF side, most are passively managed and follow an index, although a small share do employ active management.

For the most part, actively managed funds cost more than those that are passively managed because you’re paying for investment-picking expertise.

In investment funds, the cost is called the expense ratio and is expressed as a percentage. It’s the share of your assets that the fund takes each year from your account as compensation for managing your money.

The average expense ratio for actively managed mutual funds is 1.1 percent, according to Morningstar, an investment research and management firm in Chicago. For ETFs, meanwhile, the passive bulk of them come with an average expense ratio that’s half that: 0.51 percent.

Your investment fees matter because they take a bite out of money that otherwise would be in your account to continue growing. The bigger the yearly expense, the bigger the hit to your earnings over time.

Say you invested $100,000 for 20 years and your annual return was 4 percent. If you paid 0.25 percent yearly, you’d have close to $210,000 at the end of those two decades, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Office of Investor Education and Advocacy.

In contrast, if you paid 1 percent a year, the return on that $100,000 after 20 years would be way less: $180,000.

As mentioned, actively managed funds have an expert — or team of experts — choosing exactly how to invest your money. The fund’s prospectus outlines parameters that the fund managers must follow when choosing investments, and performance is based on whether the fund’s management team gets their picks right.

Most ETFs have no flexibility in the investments, so if the index they track does well, so does your holding. And if the index tanks? Guess what.

In theory, in actively managed mutual funds, the mix of holdings can be altered by the fund manager to avoid huge losses. While that doesn’t always turn out as planned, it’s an advantage that could bode well in a bad market environment.

Of course if you’re invested for the long haul, short-term swings in the market — or even prolonged down markets — shouldn’t make you panic.

Another big difference between traditional mutual funds and ETFs is how they are traded.

Traditional mutual funds — whether actively managed or index funds — can only be bought and sold once daily, after the market’s 4 p.m. ET close.

In contrast, ETFs trade throughout the day like stocks. This means investors can react to market news quickly to buy or sell when it suits them.

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However, long-term investors — such as those saving for a retirement that’s decades away — should generally be sticking to an investment strategy that is not based on trying to time the market, whether they are in ETFs or mutual funds.

“Most long-term investors have no real need to be able to transact at, say, 10 in the morning instead of at the end of the day,” said Ben Johnson, director of global ETF research at Morningstar.

When mutual funds sell investments throughout the year, any profits from those transactions get passed on to the fund’s shareholders via capital gains distributions.

If your mutual funds are in a taxable account — i.e., a brokerage account — you’ll owe taxes on the gains for the year they were distributed.

However, if you hold mutual funds in a tax-advantaged account — i.e., 401(k) plan or an individual retirement account — you don’t need to worry about it because gains are deferred until you withdraw money in retirement.

“If you’re a long-term investor, it’s not a big deal,” McAleer said. “It’s the short-term investor’s dilemma.”

Generally speaking, capital gains are less likely with ETFs, due to how they are constructed and how they are traded. This makes them generally more tax-efficient.

Most mutual funds disclose their holdings quarterly. In contrast, investors can view a typical ETF’s holdings online any time they want.

However, some experts think this difference matters little to most investors.

“I’d argue there are very few investors who care to look at all stocks that their ETF owns every day,” Johnson said.

Disclosure: NBCUniversal and Comcast Ventures are investors in Acorns.