The REALISTIC Millionaire Investing Advice In Your 20s

What are the boys? I'm Graham, so some of you know that I recently turned 30 and looking back, my 20s have been by far the most transformative years of my entire life, not just in terms of

investing

my money into creating my wealth, but also. in terms of all the little daily habits you could start doing today that add up to something big over time, so for anyone in their 20s wondering what they could start doing today, here's everything I've learned along the way over the last ten years. and a lot of this has taken me over a decade to really understand that no joke, this is really one of those videos where I wish I could go back in time and just show this to myself at 20 years old.

I think I would have saved myself a lot of time and would have gotten a lot further if I had started some of this earlier, like when I started at 18, fresh out of high school, with no college degree and no real idea what I was doing. was doing, but I made my way as a real estate agent. I discovered the most creative ways I could save money and not spend it. I learned the basics of real estate

investing

by watching what my clients did. Then I discovered that, wait a second, I should open a retirement account and Investing in index funds when I was 30, I had a net worth of $6 million for comparison.

When I was 18, I had maybe a few thousand dollars that I had saved by working part-time during high school, so to move on from there. As far as where I am today it still seems a bit like a dream that I'm about to wake up from at any moment, but assuming I'm not living in a dream like virtual reality states here of all the personal finance and investment tips for creating of wealth. It took me years to figure it out and I'm just going to lay them all out for you to pick up and use and hope they come in handy and make you a ton of money when you're older and I have no idea how long.

This video will be, but believe me, this is one of the videos worth watching from start to finish. I want it to be as complete as possible so as not to leave out anything that it's really meant to be. a comprehensive video that covers everything you need to know and you can always come back to watch it again to make sure you stay on track and everything I ask in return if you find it helpful in any way its just a quick like on the video , that's it, I promise this video will help you make more money and just pressing the like button takes a sixteenth of a second, it helps me help you with something, the YouTube algorithm and that's it, that's all I ask for and , of course. as a thank you for doing that, here is a photo of a kitten.

With that being said, here's everything you need to know and we'll start here now as I want to make sure I don't leave anything out in this video. We'll break it down into segments, the first part will be about personal finance so you can maximize the amount of money you earn and save and then we'll talk about exactly where and how to invest

your

money so that one day you could buy a Lamborghini if ​​you want, but to do it first We'll have to talk about this to start. Let's talk briefly about college and student loan debt.

No wonder this has quickly become a truly worrying $1.6 trillion epidemic. outstanding student loans and the average graduate with more than $31,000 in debt; What's even worse is that many young people are pressured to go to university because it is the safe way to go without understanding the implications of how much it will cost and how. are they going to pay for it or even why they are going to go to college in the first place. Because of that, it's more important than ever to stay away from student loan debt at all costs, unless you have a clear career path to know what. you want to do and going to a certain university will help you get there.

It's usually best to go to an affordable community college, save the money first, and then figure out where to go from there if there's something specific you want to go to. so by all means do it, but this is by far the best route to take to save a lot of money and when you graduate you will be in the same place as everyone else except you won't have a lot of student loan debt. It's simply about putting

your

self in the strongest financial position for when you enter the workforce. That way, you'll have more money left to save and invest without being overwhelmed by debt, even if you're not sure what you want. do or if college is right for you in the first place, don't worry, it's okay and we'll move on to the next step, the second one, get a job, I really want to be one of those old people one day who just sits in the rocking chair in front to the house and yells at all the kids in the neighborhood to go get a job that will one day be me, but seriously, if there's one thing that helped me when I was younger it was to go and become practical. work experience until you go and do that, it's really hard to fully appreciate the value of your time and how hard it could be to go and make money, so it really puts things into perspective, like my first job was in high school and I worked at a marine aquarium wholesaler doing everything they wanted me to do.

I started out when I wanted to work for free just because I had a lot of fun doing it but that soon evolved to me getting paid and receiving free fish and coral and then from there I started taking photos of their inventory and getting paid a commission depending on how many photos I took. You could take them in Photoshop and then put them on your website, but I'll tell you that doing it to understand how much something costs in relation to how much money you make is really an eye-opening experience to just go and see, wait a second, that cup of coffee is going to make me costing 30 minutes of my time made me never want to go buy a cup of Starbucks coffee and that gave me a really deep appreciation for never wanting to waste it. money, this also taught me how to interact with adults, the importance of customer service and just practical skills that will help you make more money.

That's why I recommend everyone, if possible, get a part-time job that you can do throughout high school. college or as soon as you can start working. I truly believe this will be one of the most valuable experiences you will ever have and I must say I can tell the difference between the type of person who has work experience and the type of person who doesn't trust me as much when I say this this will be a good experience for you and they will pay you to get that experience, what's not to like about that and lastly, I just want to mention that if you are in a mindset where you don't want to go to college and you're not exactly sure what to do with your life or what you want to do at work, potentially just look at trade schools, plumbers, electricians, welders, whatever, it can really pay.

Well, as you gain experience, many of those fields will continue to see more and more demand each year, so go out and look for a trade school. I would highly recommend it and I think a lot of those races are absolutely fantastic. The number three is something that applies to any time in your life, but it is especially important during your 20s because it is a time when it is easy to get carried away and that would mean not going into debt as a consumer, this means that you do not accumulate a whole sum. a lot of debt to buy things you don't need, don't go financing a really fancy car, don't go rent a really fancy apartment, don't shout to impress your friends with how much money you have in total.

That's stupid, it's reckless and I guarantee you'll look back in 10 years and regret it. It's just that you stay away from consumer debt like this at all costs, and basically, if your debt isn't making you more money, don't do it. From everything I've learned, your 20s are really the best time to get your way and live like you're totally broke and no one will question it. If you live with your parents, it's okay if you drive a beat-up car, that's totally fine. If you live in a rough part of town with a bunch of roommates that's great, all of these things get a little harder as you get older and it becomes less socially acceptable to live with your parents at 40 and eat frozen food. .

You eat dinner every night because you're cheap when you're 45 and people start looking at you a little differently, but when you're 20, okay, hopefully, that means you're not going to buy a new car. When you're 20, don't spend two extra money to live in an apartment in the cool part of town, save as much as you can and invest it, go live with roommates if that will save you more money if you could. If you hunker down and save non-stop in your 20s, you could set yourself up for the rest of your life with the decisions you end up making right now and whether you find yourself in any kind of consumer debt or credit card debt or whatever. at least make that a priority right now to pay off my rule of thumb has always been this: if you pay more than a four percent interest rate, it's most likely worth it, just pay it off as soon as possible if the debt it's less than four percent, so it's okay to take your time paying it off, but I'll go into more detail on that shortly because right now we should talk about the next number four and this is something I wish would be included. me on the day I turned 18 and that would be to go get a credit card and increase your credit score as soon as possible.

I think I opened my first credit card when I was 21 or 22 years old and although before that there were people who told me not to open a credit card. He was simply too stubborn to listen. I grew up thinking that credit cards were bad and that they only went bankrupt, people needed credit cards and that I would be in a better financial position if I just used a debit card and paid for everything in cash, but boy was I wrong when I went to buying my first property, all the banks denied me just because I had no credit history and because I had no one to help me. co-sign for me, all the banks flat out said no, even though I had two years of tax returns and money in the bank, which was a big wake-up call for me to get very serious about building credit and, As stupid as it might be, to leave. and put all your expenses on one credit card and then pay it off right after, that's how the system works and it's better to use it to your advantage than try to fight it, so I opened a credit card and immediately after became obsessed with maximizing the rewards, getting free stuff, traveling places paying zero dollars out of pocket and raising my credit score now, eight years later, doing that gives me access to millions of dollars in low interest rate mortgages, more free trips than I know what to do with and a credit score that gives me the best lowest interest rates any time I want to take advantage of my money and honestly your teens and 20s are the best time for you to build your credit score because you have the time right now to develop it sooner.

You need to go and finance anything and all you need to do to get started with this is simply open a $200 secured credit card, put some expenses on the car, each and every month and then pay it off in full, that's it , zero dollars a year. interest, you'll increase your credit score, and over time you'll be able to continue getting more credit cards, adding to the mix and maximizing the rewards. Doing this will be totally free and the only thing it will cost you is maybe ten minutes of your time and I have another video that describes all the details you need to know so I will link it below in the description if your 20s is the best time to live below your means and no one will bat an eye, seriously.

I have found that the older you get, the less socially acceptable it is to live like a broke college student and also the less you want to live like a broke college student, so now is your best chance to get away with doing all the cheap and as frugal as you can. I've always wanted to avoid having people criticize you for it, so if possible, live as if you're earning twenty-five to fifty percent less than you actually earn and then keep it that way. Here's the thing in psychology, there's a term called the hedonic treadmill and remember the ability to always return to our baseline level of happiness, regardless of what happens, even if you move to a better place or buy a new car, that it will make you temporarily happier with the time you will return to. the same level of happiness that you had before, except now you will need even more to reach the same level of happiness that you reached before and that continues more and more, so by recognizing this from the beginning, you will be able to eliminate all your spending that is not going to make any difference, put it toward something that's more important, and then just make the most of your20s, believe me when I say this, but living really frugally during my 20s is what made it all possible for me today if I had done it.

I wasted my money on designer clothes, sumptuous dinners, expensive apartments, sure it would all have been temporarily fun, but then I wouldn't have had anything to show for it. I just lived like I was making thirty thousand dollars a year and then everything else was saved. and invested even now to this day. I still do exactly the same thing to a certain extent. I only spend what my investments earn and then everything else they earn is saved and reinvested. I just firmly believe it's totally fine and even encourage it. living well below your means in your 20s if it means you could set yourself up for the rest of your life in your teens or 20s.

It's really a time for you to hide away, save as much as you can, work overtime and just tough it out. to save and when you are 30 years old, I promise you that you will be very happy with the decisions you have made. fact if you're not going to remember those expensive shoes you bought 10 years ago but you will remember it every morning when you look at your bank account zero extra there I promise it will be a lot more fun to look at it every day now, number six all the items I just mentioned They're not going to matter without this one and that's the importance of tracking your spending throughout your 20s, seriously.

I know I've said this several times before, but it's so true that tracking your expenses is really like the glue that holds all of this together. You can't effectively cut back and live below your means without calculating how much money you're making. , where it is going, where you are spending your money and where you can return. I've been tracking every single expense on mint.com and personal capital communication since 2012 and doing this has helped me optimize my finances a lot. The most important aspect of this, I will say, is that it is not always the big expenses that often add up to the most money.

The best savings come from all the small frequent daily purchases that you make without even thinking about it and that over time add up to a large amount of money, like imagine paying fifteen dollars for a lunch alone, it is not a large amount. deal, but do it every other day for a year and suddenly you lose $2,700 without even thinking about it, which is why it's very important to get in the habit of doing this now, because the longer you wait, the harder it will be. Although I am not sponsored by any of these companies to mention them, I highly recommend mint.com, a personal capital com, they are both free and then all you need to do is create an account and then track your spending from time to time. days and monitor where all your money goes, you'll be able to see where you're wasting money, how you can cut back, and how you can grow your savings over time.

When it comes down to it, the hardest part is actually getting started and you know the saying, everything you measure improves and that's very true with your finances, except sorry guys, not with that, but with your finances it doesn't prove the seventh and this one is exactly related to personal finance, but it ended up helping me do. a lot more money and that means getting used to taking uncomfortable risks. I have truly discovered that the worst place you can be in when you are 20 is complacent if you are happy with where you are now but know deep down that you are not living up to your true potential, the only way to overcome it is to put yourself low. pressure, you have to start getting used to making uncomfortable decisions and taking calculated risks to get out of it and get ahead, for example, I was working I was at Coldwell Banker as a real estate agent for seven years, making a six-figure income with a really optimized, but deep down I felt like I had plateaued and needed a change of scenery to propel me to the next level I could have reached.

I took the easy and really comfortable approach of staying where I was or I could take the risk and move my business to the Oppenheim group where I could try something different at the time. I was really nervous about making that decision because Coldwell Banker was really all I knew, but looking back in retrospect, making that move was one of the best decisions and has challenged me in so many other ways that I wouldn't be here today without it. . The same also applies when making YouTube videos, this is something I wanted. do since 2011, but I never had the courage.

I honestly thought who would look at me. I would just make a fool of myself. I would look stupid on camera and I kept turning him down over and over again, but after years of wishing I could. making youtube videos I finally went and did it and now obviously that's one of the best decisions I've ever made. I love the process. I had a lot of fun doing this. I met some of my best friends through YouTube and yes it was. It's not for me to overcome those insecurities and I was trying hard to get ahead.

I wouldn't be here today. Just take a look at this in your own life. You always experience the most personal growth whenever you push yourself beyond your comfort zone. just get used to doing that when you're 20 and I promise you it will be a lot easier and these will be decisions you won't regret later ok so with that out of the way in building the foundation let's go over the practical . step by step guide on how you can increase your net worth, how you can invest, how you can build your wealth with as little work as possible and it all starts here first, you will want to open a retirement account, these are accounts that end up saving you money on your taxes and some of them can be used as a tax write off, others allow your earnings to grow completely tax free, it just depends on which ones you want to use and the whole point of doing this is that it simply leaves you with more money left over at the end of the day and who doesn't want to? to have more money left over, so here in the United States we have three main retirement accounts that we will cover in this video the first of which is what is known as a Roth IRA.

This is an account that allows you to contribute up to $6,000 a year and then any earnings you make within the account will be completely tax-free after age fifty-nine. and a half the reason I like it so much is because the money you put into this account is known as after-tax money, which means you've already paid taxes on the money you have left over. The good thing about this is that in your 20s you're probably not making much money anyway and that's why you're not in a high tax bracket and that's why you're not losing much of your money on taxes, which just means that you'll end up having more. money.

What's left to invest, on top of that, your money has a lot of time to grow with what's known as compound interest, which means your money ends up making you more money, which ends up making you even more money, and then when you're sixty . You'll have plenty of money left over completely tax-free so you can use it on whatever you want, and of course, as usual, I have another video below in the description where I cover everything you need to know about a Roth IRA and want to start one. with all the details, again it is below in the description.

Now the second account you may consider opening is what is known as a traditional 401k. Now this is an account that you can invest money in pre-tax and after. You are taxed on the money once you start withdrawing it after age 59 1/2, for example, if you invest $500 a month in a 401K, you will be taxed as if you made $500 a month less than you. That actually saves you money up front and allows you to invest more money than if you simply paid taxes now. From my perspective, the 401K makes a lot of sense if your employer offers what is known as a 401k match. is when your employer will match your contribution dollar for dollar up to a certain amount essentially, this is like you are immediately doubling your money without any risk and the general rule of thumb for doing this is that you should always do it, don't even think about it, just do it without hesitation, always invest up to the maximum employer contribution you can and thirdly, with all the recent health issues, you might also consider investing in what's called a health savings account, which is also known as an HSA and this.

One is probably the best retirement account you can have, of course, there are some qualifications you need to follow and you can easily discover them with a quick Google search, but assuming you qualify, you can contribute up to $3,500 a year completely tax-free. this account now this account is specifically used to pay for any out of pocket medical expenses that you may incur if you don't use them one year then okay it rolls over to the next year no this is really cool because like I said this is probably one of the accounts with the best tax advantages on the entire planet.

First of all, you don't pay taxes on the money you contribute to the account, so there are two tax write-offs per second and you don't pay taxes on that. money when you spend it on out-of-pocket medical expenses, so again, that's also tax-free, it's basically like you're getting completely tax-free money that you will never have to pay taxes on any medical expenses that we will all inevitably have in some time or another, so again, there's no reason why you shouldn't look into this and not do this after you open your retirement account, you're going to have to figure out where you're going to invest your money and as I mentioned before in a previous video , everything you need to know about investing can really be summed up in less than a few minutes and there you have it, these are those few minutes for most people who want to invest in retirement accounts.

There is no point in researching individual stocks to buy and sell or investing in Tesla options and making all these yolo bets on Robin Hood. Instead, there are really only three things you need to invest in and that's it. It's what's known as the three-fund portfolio and it covers pretty much everything, so you're investing around the world and it goes up in value and that way, if one company or industry goes down, it doesn't really matter, you have hundreds and thousands of others to pick up the pace and all of this is simply investing 80% of your money in SP 500 index funds.

Now this tracks the top 500 publicly traded companies in the United States, such as Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Netflix, whatever, then. You are going to invest 10% of your money in an international stock market index fund that will cover all emerging markets. This way you'll get even more diversification as other countries grow and develop and lastly you could put 10% of your money in a bond for an index fund like this, vit nonsense, see normally how this works, it's That when the stock market goes down, bond prices go up, so think of this a little bit as your safety net, this one will give you a little more stability in your account so you don't see all these wild fluctuations today.

Between all of these funds, you should expect to see a 5 to 8 percent return each year with reinvested dividends that take inflation into account. It's completely passive income that builds your wealth completely tax-free over decades and decades, even if you invest $500 a month in one of these accounts from age 20 until age 60, that could potentially be worth one point eight million. dollars without taxes. -free just by following this

advice

and alternatively if you want to go even easier just invest in Beatty Sachs or a total stock index fund which covers literally everything, it's pretty much everything in one fund and all you have to do is buy. the same thing constantly every month and that's it, of course in the future if you have more money in the best width you could start investing in real estate or other various investments but until then this for most people It will be the simplest. easy approach now in terms of any investment details, we don't really have to get too complicated here, but remember it's really easy to say that time in the market is better than time in the market, that's all, there have been numerous studies done They show that the more you buy and sell stocks and try to time the market perfectly, the lower your overall performance, and over a twenty year period, the most successful and profitable traders simply buy and hold, that's it, they buy when the market goes up, they buy when the market goes down. just keep buying and buying and buying that's it, in fact the strategy of just buying the market every month consistently even beats the perfect market timing where you keep your money in cash and then buy everything at once when you see a big drop and the The reason for this is that succeeding in timing the market accurately and consistently every time becomes almost impossible and during the time you hold cash waiting for a drop, you miss out on all the times the stock market rises.

That is why it is almost always better to buy in the marketsYou constantly keep your money in cash and try to wait for the perfect fall even right now. Whenever you're looking at this, the stock market may look a little overvalued, but twenty years from now it will be. Today's prices will almost certainly look like a bargain even if they end up going down in the short term, so it's best to get in on the markets, don't worry about what happens in the short term, just keep buying again and again. and finally, when you're in your 20s, after you've done everything I just mentioned, it's very important to understand how this all comes together and understand how much money you can make if you can save just fifteen dollars a day in a Roth IRA.

Starting at age 20 invested in an index fund like this, when you're 60 you'll have about one point six million dollars tax-free, so right there you'll be a

millionaire

with $15 a day, which is your total. retirement right there, then if you increase that same investment to $20 a day you will get one point eight million dollars tax free and of course increase that same investment to $30 a day and you will have 3.2 million dollars and really the most difficult to All of this just starts and then stays constant from here as almost a guarantee if you follow these strategies you will be a

millionaire

when you are retired just by keeping going and I say this as someone who follows all of these tips consistently and if it weren't For this reason, I would not be here today.

I always make sure to stay out of it. debt tracking my expenses reinvesting money in the markets living below my means and of course as always hitting the like button for the YouTube algorithm so with that being said thank you so much for watching. I really appreciate it, as always, if you found this video helpful. It would mean a lot to me if you subscribe and hit the notification bell. Also feel free to add me on Instagram. I post your posts almost daily, so if you want to be a part of this, feel free to add me there like on my Second Channel, The Graham Stefan Show.

I post there every day. I won't be posting here so if you want to see a new to me video every day be sure to add yourself to it and lastly if you want to use free shares. the link below in the description and weeble will give you 2 free shares when you deposit $100 on the platform with one of those shares potentially valued up to $1400 if you want to release shares it is one of them potentially valued up to a lot of money use the link below, let me know you will get two free shares. Thank you very much for watching and until next time.