What financial advice have you gotten or wish you had gotten years ago? 30 y/r old male btw. Currently rent.
Answered a similar question from somebody else as far as what advice I wish I had gotten/listed to when I was younger, so slightly modified to focus more on financial (but not completely financial):
(1) With the exception of traveling, keep your college lifestyle as long as possible. College was a blast and spending more doesn't really improve much. Really, whatever you are spending money on you won't get as much happiness as you will from the peace of mind of not being reliant on a paycheck. I consider myself very blessed right now, but if you had shown college me my earnings up to this point, he would have expected to be able to retire by now, and his expectations would have been completely reasonable. But I let lifestyle inflation get me, and it's much harder to cut back than to just avoid the inflation to begin with. So now I'll probably have to work until my mid to late 50's even if I don't have any significant setbacks.
(2) Spend money on experiences, not things. There's plenty of research to back this up.
(3) Tied in with #1, you should really max out your 401k and roth each year. If you keep your college lifestyle, you could probably do that if you make at least $50k without major sacrifices.
(4) More specific, go use a home loan to buy a duplex or preferably a fourplex that could breakeven cashflow wise on a 15 year note if you just rented it out, but live in it and put it on a 30 year note. As quickly as you can get another loan, go do it again and rent out the previous one. Repeat until you can no longer get a 30 year loan with a fixed interest rate. They likely won't be great investments, but the leverage will get you a pretty good return on investment while being relatively passive and be pretty low risk if you finance them on a 30 year note, and if you manage them yourself, you'll end up learning a lot that will be helpful. You could very easily have 20 paid for doors 20 years out of school without doing much. If you're not going to buy stuff that you can convert to rentals, don't be in a hurry to buy a house. Renting is not throwing your money away.
(5) Use Mint and track all your spending. It will clarify what you spend your money on versus what you get enjoyment from spending money on.
(6) Set up a spreadsheet calculating how long until you will be financially independent. It will keep you balanced between the now and future.
For the less financially related topics:
(7) Stop worrying. Unless you have a health event (which you can't control anyway, so no sense in worrying about it), you're worst case scenario is pretty good, so live in the moment a little more without worrying about the future.
(8) Stay in shape. It's so easy, just don't put on the extra weight to begin with and always exercise. Don't spend 10 years out of shape and then get in shape with three months of pretty moderate exercise and dieting. You could have just eat and drink reasonably to begin with and exercise a little and be in better shape the entire time and be in much healtheir at 45 without those ten years of wear and tear.
(9) Be way more open to moving for your career. Don't be locked into an area with very few large employers that can pay you.
(10) Spend more time thinking about what makes you happy. Don't dive into your career and think that a prestigious career and money is the goal. Figure out what you want the money for and what the best way to get it is.
(11) Take more risks. The top 5% of pay for most professions is plenty good enough, and easy enough to get if you like what you do, so don't think you have to pick a high paying profession. You have more options than CPA/LLM/MD/PE etc.
(12) Travel. This is the only thing you should probably spend more money on than you did. You can take ten days off for real travel. Don't rush over seas trips in order to only take five days off of work.
