8 Financial Tips for Young Adults

If you want to know how to build wealth for teenagers, even if you're in your 20s or 30s, or just anybody who thinks that they're young. In this article, you'll know everything you need to do to set yourself up for financial success and be able to make the most money.

Built A Foundation

You can first you're going to need to build a financial foundation with two books that I absolutely love. After going through a dozen of these kinds of books, my two favorites are the million next door and I Will Teach You To Be Rich, you can very easily find free copies online. These two books are really great introductory courses on how to manage your money and critical mistakes to avoid which is the foundation for the next old tips. 

Constantly Be Learning

constantly be learning I don't mean to go to college necessarily. What I mean is that you want to be a sponge and constantly learn and be able to improve your skills. Remember, there will never be a time when you can't learn more, you may think that you're the smartest 14-year-old on the planet, but there are different types of intelligence. 

Academic intelligence is not the same as wisdom where wisdom only comes with age and experience. Hey, guys, if you want to learn the secrets of being a millionaire, just buy this course for $399. And this is the discounted rate from the $1,000 price just for today. So buy down below. Go ahead, buy it, buy it, buy it right now personally, I have nothing to sell you there are free and effective ways to learn everything you need to learn online. 

And as a teenager, you have time on your site to experiment with different topics, spend one month just learning one topic and it could be any topic. And if you don't find it interesting, move on until you find something that really clicks with you. Some free sites can offer you things for free like YouTube Coursera Udacity, they give you everything you need to know to slowly build your skills and learn. 

What are some financial tips that every teenager should know?

And the importance here is that you'll never know when you can apply them in a new way to build wealth. I have a friend and he bought a house. A few years after high school, it was rundown, it was trashy, and it needed a lot of work. But he immediately started to renovate it himself. 

Because he worked in construction for a few months with his dad, he knew some of the basic skills to remodel houses. But for the most part, he just watched videos on YouTube on how to do the rest. But the real value here wasn't the main part of the house that he was remodeling for himself. But instead, it was the detached one-car garage. 

Originally, if you first saw this garage, when he bought it, it wouldn't even have crossed your mind to park your car in it because the entire structure was down it was pretty much broken but after several months of working on it on the weekends and after work, he was able to transform the garage into a beautiful studio apartment where he listed on Airbnb and within his first month. 

In his first month, he was able to generate around $2,000 in income, and instantly he was able to increase his income stream by 50%. 

Find Someone Living Your Future Goals

Along with his construction job other than strictly just learning and building your skills. I also recommend that you find someone that's older than you someone that you look up to, and you want to be on a similar path to us one day. 

And what you want to do is you want to build a relationship with them and learn everything you can and the person doesn't have to be like a super nationally recognized person. Either you can find these people from your community, or you can go to a local real estate group, or your local business owner, and ask if you can work for them for free.

How Teens Can Become Millionaires

But the most boring thing is you want to give them value. You want to show them all those skills that you've picked up over the past years, and the past month, and you want to show them how you can provide this person value and help their business grow. If that person says no, then that's fine. Move on to the next one.

But if that person says yes, I want you to be a sponge and absorb everything from that person. How did the person get to where he or she was? What advice do they have if they were 15 years old again? What would they do differently? But, how can I build wealth if I'm working for free? Fantastic question. But the goal for this particular tip isn't to make money that's for the next tip that we'll get into. 

The goal right now is to constantly learn with hands-on experience. You're paying the price right now in order to reap the massive benefits in the future. And I'll show you how this works and how all these tie together. 

Start Earning Money

The next step is to start earning money. And the reason I put this after constantly learning is that at this age, this really should come second in priority. Your primary goal should just be to learn as much as possible because you never know when there will be a business opportunity for you to make money. 

And with each skill that you actually pick up, you'll start to view the world differently with more opera To knees, because you're going to be exposed to more things that you haven't seen. before I started my first business when I was 12 years old when I was flipping things in middle school. And I started off with a single $2 bill that a lot of people thought was rare.

 I actually had a bunch of them because my dad used to work in a supermarket and you would collect these bills from the cash register. And then one day I brought these $2 bills or about one $2 Bill to school because I wanted to buy a snack. And when I took that bill out, all my friends were amazed a lot of people I realized, including my friends never seen a $2 bill before. 

So they obviously really wanted one. I started to sell them for $5 each. And that was probably the easiest 250% profit that I ever made. From there, I use the profits that I made. And I started to expand my business. And I bought cases of these candy bars from Costco. And I sold them to my cat classmates for $1 $2. And again, I was able to 2x or 3x My overall money. 

What is your financial advice for teenagers in the era of inflation?

So starting a business doesn't have to be a revolutionary idea. It can be really, really small, like selling candy to your classmates, just make sure you continuously experiment with your ideas. And if that doesn't work, then just experiment with another one. Remember, every time that you fail, it's actually a benefit because it continuously adds to your repertoire of constantly learning and wisdom because, in the future, you'll know exactly what not to do.

And plus even if you fail 999 times, all it takes is one success to forget about all those past times that you failed. And just be clear, you're starting to earn money, it doesn't have to be entrepreneurial either. You could very well work in a supermarket stacking cheese in boxes, or working folding clothes in a laundromat because honestly, whatever you do. 

At this age, you're going to be picking up a business or social skills like for summer too when I was a teenager actually worked with my dad at a supermarket and I got paid for it. But at the same time, I was learning a ton about customer service supply, and demand. And basically, the basic business concepts that I wouldn't have learned if I never went for this job. 

Eventually, you'll learn enough where you get promoted, you switch jobs or you start doing your own thing. Remember, making money is like a skill like playing video games, you will get better at it over time. And you don't expect to be like a super world-class player for a fortnight for the very first time that you play. It takes time it takes practice and it takes consistency.

Start Saving Your Money

The next step is to start saving your money. If you want to be consistent with this and don't touch your savings except for the two things that I'll share in the next tip, start building these key habits and always save a certain percentage of your income, whether it be 10%, 20%, 30%, 40% always live below your means.

And I guess since you're a teenager, you're probably living at home and you don't have that many expenses either. And finally, make sure you track your expenses, what's coming in, and what's going out with free apps like MIT. And yet, it's probably not sounding fun right now to save money. 

But saving is a muscle and you need to strengthen that muscle over time. And I'll actually show you later on how your $1 Save today can actually be worth $117 over time. And I remember a recent conversation that I had with a friend over coffee. And we talked about a bunch of different things from traveling to work to his passion for music, and that he was also doing DoorDash on the side for extra income.

He had a really solid job working for some entertainment company downtown somewhere in DoorDash, which he said allowed him to earn some extra bit of money on the side by delivering food a couple of times throughout the week. So naturally asked him what was he spending his extra money on. 

And he told me that he loved listening to music and that he wanted to buy two things. One is you want to upgrade his home theater system to have more high-quality high-end speakers. And number two is you want to get some really super high-quality studio-level headphones. Now, these are really fun purchases to make. And it's great that he's able to work extra hard to buy these things. 

But it kind of reminded me that the reason why most people aren't able to build Well, it's because when most people do increase their earnings, those extra earnings that don't go into well, for the most part for people throughout the world, the extra income disappears into lifestyle inflation, or temporary purchases when the money could be put to work much more effectively. If you do want to build wealth, the extra money that you get, especially at this age should either be spent on acquiring new skills

Invest Your Money

The next tip is to invest your money. But I don't just mean in the stock market, which we'll get into in just a bit, but also on your business and yourself. By investing early on. It'll actually teach you to value long-term rewards over a short-term satisfaction and this mindset that you establish is immensely important. 

There's actually a fascinating marshmallow experiment done at Stanford that assesses children's capacity for delaying pleasure and resisting temptation. What they did was they put the children inside a room by themselves and they gave them a marshmallow and the experimenters told the kids if they wait 15 minutes, then, later on, they'll get two marshmallows to eat.

If they don't wait and they eat the first marshmallow immediately, then they only receive that one marshmallow after telling them this the kid is left alone in the room and they're free to make their decision either eat the marshmallow or wait for the next one. The longer the child is able to wait before they eat the marshmallow.

Then it showed that they actually had a greater ability to delay pleasure or gratification, and the results were actually pretty startling. It showed that children even at such a young age, who were able to wait longer for the two marshmallows, had better social skills had higher academic test scores and were better and more successful later on in life. 

That's why it's so important to start strengthening that delayed gratification muscle right now by investing for the future. But the question is, what should you invest in, but the truth is, you probably don't have too much money to invest in at your age, and investing definitely becomes more powerful when you have more money. 

How should I start saving as a teenager?

Think about it. If you invest $100, versus investing $100,000 into the market with just a 5% return, the former will actually earn you $5, and the latter will earn you $5,000. That's why at your age, I tend to recommend investing in yourself or your business, whether that is to learn a new skill or to expand your income streams. 

For example, let's say that you were selling one box of candy to friends in school. Now you can use your profits or your extra money to buy three boxes of candy and maybe even hire some friends to sell them with you simply expand your business and grow and from there, you'll be able to exponentially grow your income, and then you'll have more money to invest in. 

Now, I'm also not saying do not invest in a stock market if you don't have much money, because a 5% gain is still a 5% gain. If you have $10 $100, or even $1,000 As a teenager, you should definitely get started investing in the stock market as well. And I'll share some math with you in just a bit.

But you can chat with your parents to open up a custodial account. Or if you have earned income from your business or from your job, you can actually open up a tax advantage IRA account. So in our original example, $1 is worth $117. Over time, if we invest that $1 For 50 years.

And we assume a rate of return of 10% per year, which is totally possible with the investments that I'm sharing with you later on. And you might be thinking $117 is nothing, especially if I have to wait 50 years for that. But now, if we actually bump up their investment contribution, and instead of just $1 for 50 years, we actually had $100 every single month. 

Well, by the end of those 50 years, you'd have $1.7 million. And that is the power of long-term investing. Now just imagine, if you increase that to maybe $200 per month or $300 per month, that is going to increase substantially over time. So what should you invest in? Firstly, take advantage of getting two free stocks valued up to $2,300 with weeble.

But also I'm personally a big fan of these things called index funds. Because index funds, they're super easy to invest in and they're diversified. And you can pretty much set it up and completely forget about it actually. 

Focus On Your Credit Score

Now right before I head to the most important thing you can do to build your wealth. Let's actually talk about the importance of your credit score. And one of the best ways to increase your credit score is with a credit card. Now normally, I think giving a teenager a credit card isn't the best idea. But since you're reading this article, you are not a normal teenager getting started early by using a credit card responsibly will help your credit card immensely by the time you're older.

Because with your credit score, credit history is a huge factor. And having a high credit score can actually save you 10s of 1000s of dollars over time because you'll get lower interest rates, you will have lower down payments and you'll pay less in fees actually started building my credit score back in high school. 

How to become a teenage millionaire?

So you can imagine that I found it a bit strange that even after I graduated, I heard a ton of my friends and my co-workers complain about how they couldn't get certain loans or get approved for rent because they didn't have enough credit history. But then I realized that not everyone actually starts and opens a credit card. In high school, if you want to be extra prepared and have a good credit score. 

The two options for you to have at this age are one, you can be added as an authorized user on one of your parent's credit cards. Or number two, you can check out a secured credit card which requires a security deposit. That would be your line of credit. But the absolute most important thing that you need to remember when you open up a credit card is that you never want to spend more than you can afford.

And you want to make sure you pay your bills in full on time, every single time. If you're late, then you have to pay these late fees and you'll potentially have to have higher interest rates which will even negatively impact your credit score. 

Take Care Of Your Health

The last type of probably the most important that very few people actually talk about when it comes to building wealth is actually paying attention to your health. Many people out there actually spend their health to gain wealth and then they have to spend their wealth to regain their health later on in life.

I used to have an older coworker super nice, and very sweet. She was around 40 to 50 ish and had worked extremely hard her entire life and even in the office. She would survive off of coffee. She would work late throughout the night. She skipped lunches and now she's paying the price for all of that this lady and we'll call her Stephanie.

She's now tied to her oxygen tank 24/7 and is barely able to leave her house other than to go to the dialysis center three times a week to treat her diabetes. Her health is now in such poor condition that even if there was a kidney available for transplant, the doctor said that they wouldn't give it to her because they were concerned she wouldn't survive, or she wouldn't recover from the operation. 

She's relatively young. But she was already forced to be in this condition because she was so focused on attaining wealth that she really did not pay attention whatsoever to her own health. And it's really sad to witness especially when you heard her dreams in the past where she wants to travel. 

She wants to retire, be able to spend as much time with her as she can with her grandchildren, and just realizing that that's going to be so much more challenging with her given her health condition. Now, also just putting aside all the obvious wonders of having in living a healthy life, by being able to move and be free.

You also will be able to save a ton of money if you're healthy because medical bills and health problems are some of the most expensive costs and expenses not only upfront but also in terms of opportunity costs. Because when you're going to the hospital when you're making doctor visits or when you're bedridden, you're going to be missing out on things that you could have enjoyed.

All these tips and strategies should definitely be intertwined with each other to truly supercharge your path to building wealth as a teenager.