Investing When You’re Young

So you’re a young person. Heads up. This is by far the most important article for you.

If you’re saving $200 to $300 a month every single month, and you’re putting that into some type of investment vehicle (it could be a TD Ameritrade or Vanguard mutual fund, a money market account, an ETF, or a piece of real estate), your saving translates to $3,600 per year. Let’s further assume you get an average of 8% per year return and that you are committed to saving money every single month and investing your lump-sum of savings once a year.

By the end of 30 years, you will end up with $450,000. Yeah, that’s real. Check it out.

Do you know what that means, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls?

What it means is you will have that much more money waiting for you in retirement, but that again is not the end all be all. That’s only assuming that you’re putting away $300 every month. You’ll end up making more money, than you’ll end up investing a lot more into your long term retirement fund account (whatever that looks like — Roth IRA, 401k, etc).

The bottom line is if you don’t take responsibility right now of your financial future, guess what’s going to happen? You’re not going to have one and you will have more life at the end of the money. Do you know how if you spend too much during the month, you have more month at the end of the money?

Same concept here.

Do you know how that feels? That feels really bad. You can’t pay rent, you can’t go get whatever you need. That’s a problem. You don’t want that to happen.

What’s happening now is you are not setting yourself up for the right type of financial success. What ends up happening is the majority of Americans don’t have more than $25,000–40,000 saved for retirement.

Side Rant:

What does retirement mean? Quite frankly, it’s an age where the government says you have to start taking your RMDs and stuff. What does it really mean? IT’S A MINDSET THING. You can retire at the age of 35 if you want to.

Am I ever going to retire? Heck No. Are you kidding me? I’m having too much fun.

The idea of retirement that we’re told to believe is to stop working and go fly fishing for the rest of your life. I mean, first of all, I can’t stand fishing and secondly, I hate fly fishing. I don’t think you have to sit here and give yourself a specific timeline to retire.

If you’re going to live your life to the fullest, you need what? That’s right. The only way that’s going to happen is if you save, you invest and you’re smart about your money because nobody else is going to do that.

Nobody in America is going to teach you, your parents aren’t going to teach you, your teachers in middle school and high school and college won’t even teach you any of that. I went to the University of Michigan, never once was I taught how to invest in real estate or investing. If all you do is what I suggested earlier, you’ll end up with $450,000 later.

Do you know what that means? That means that you don’t have to worry about money. Also, you could take that number, multiply it by two every month or multiply it by three every month. That’s how you win the game. It’s not by buying the Porsche. It’s not by buying the Lambo. It’s not by buying a BMW three series.

Spend your money wisely. Save your money wisely. Invest your money wisely and you will be wealthy. You will have all the money in the world that you want later.