Trying to save money for the long-term when you’re in your 20s is kind of like the challenge with climate change. We know we need to, or should, do something, but we’re not really willing to pay a price to do it. Why? Because the payoff is so incredibly far down the road, and most people don’t want to make many today sacrifices in order to achieve it.
Yes, there’s a price to pay to set aside savings. It’s the stuff you’ll need to give up right now in order to have the investments way down the road. And that’s a value judgment where the long-term typically loses out to the “today” spending.
That’s the reason it almost has to be savings that come directly out of your bank account automatically. You can’t spend it if you don’t have it. My biggest financial regret is definitely not saving a few bucks every payday into an S&P ETF (electronically traded funds) index fund. Set it and forget it, because it’s a basket of the top 500 companies where you now own a tiny piece of each of them. That’s great diversification and it’ll take you less than 30 seconds to search that the S&P historical returns over the past 50 years are over 10%.
One more way to save, or likely to pay off about half your student loans in a year is also in the Money Tools book chapter called: Broke is the new rich.
If you’re graduating from university, you’ve had two or four years of living on mac and cheese. Now going into the work force with a paycheque, you have an incredible pent up demand for spending and buying stuff that you really couldn’t and didn’t for all those years.
However, if you just live like a poor student for one more year, you’re not really make any lifestyle adjustments. You’re just living on very little money for one more year. If you can do that, you’ll be able to pay off a ton of your student loans in the coming year. Only one problem: Stay on your tiny student spending plan. Once you have a credit card, bought a vehicle, stepped up for some nicer furniture, or moved to a nicer place, it’s next to impossible to give all that up again.
Maybe two or three people in your entire grad class will do what we talked about the last four weeks. I hope you’re in touch with one of them for the next couple of decades as you watch them become incredibly successful financially…