Your parents have had one shot at deciding how to save for retirement, at one time. They've had an extremely limited number of shots at choosing health plans. Maybe they have a couple of friends with weird, memorable stories about those things... probably memorable because they're outliers.

Their experience is approximately useless.

... whereas there's a huge amount of well-supported expert advice out there. You don't even need to take a course. Search the damned Internet.

... and don't give me any "cocky youth" bullshit. I'm old enough to be the parent of a large fraction of people on Hacker News.