It’s important that everyone has a plan – whether it be for a week, a month, a year or for your life (that’s preferable) but you need to have one. Making decisions while you’re young can be daunting, and hard to do, especially if you don’t know exactly what you want to do in life.
You need to find a passion that you know you can ride the ups and downs with – that you can handle anything that it throws at you, and you’re willing to tackle them head-on, rather than running away, screaming, from them.
In this post, we’re focussing on 5 short tips (in two parts) that will leave you to question yourself, not us.
Tip 1: Invest Early.
We can’t stress this enough, it’s not about getting your dream job to help pay your way through life it’s about being smart with your money from the get-go. You may be lucky enough to have an employer that will put part of your income into a superannuation fund (or the likes of) before tax so that you get a head start on these savings, but most don’t, so it’s imperative that you start saving while you’re young.
Here’s an example: if you get a job and start to put away just $14 per day at the age of 23, by the time you’re 67 you’ll have saved $1million, whereas if you started at 40, you would have to put away $42 per day to get to that mill.
Tip 2: Work Hard.
Whether this is at your schooling/studying, your relationship, your job, your social commitments, or whether it’s your saving methods, your planning, or your habits...
Work hard now so that everything comes naturally in a few years, and you’re not worrying about how you’re going to get through the week both mentally, physically and financially.
Hard work never hurt anyone – if you’re able to do this now, you’re going to not only thank yourself, but you’re going to be ahead of everyone else in your age bracket, and you can live lavish later on in life (if that’s what you’re aiming towards), or just being totally financially stable.
Tip 3: Prioritise.
This is super important in these years of your life, you may not think it, but it is. Although, yes, your 20s are the most fun, exciting times of your life, you have to make sure you’re able to support those exciting times. Now, we’re just going to put it out there, the next few statements are going to be hard to accept if you’re a ‘real 20-something-year-old’ or just coming into your 20s, but:
Travelling > Partying Every Weekend: we’re not saying ‘no’ to partying all together, but although it’s a great way to let off some steam after a long week, maybe you could consider taking the night off every once in a while and putting the money you’d spend on your night out away so that you can travel with it later on – while you’re travelling you’ll also be, meeting new people, going on a holiday, plus you have something to really look forward to! That’s a winner in our books.
Food > a $70 dress/shirt: if you need the clothes for a function, then sure, but if you’re buying it just to be on trend or because you think you deserve it, can you really justify that money, when you could have food for a week (or more) with that $70?
Things like these are what you need to prioritise, ask yourself whether you could spend your money on something more beneficial.
On top of this, prioritising your work, making the more important things come first and the rest come later, is super important. To read more about it check out Key Time Management Skills, Your Habits vs Your Bank Account and Step-By-Step Guide to being More Productive on a Daily Basis – three other posts that include this sort of thing.