Speaker 1: What's happening? It's Shane here, and in today's video, we're gonna be talking about the top five personal finance tips for college students. Now, this is gonna be a list of the top five things that I wish I would have told myself back when I started college, and the top five things that I think are the most important when it comes to personal finance for a college student. And if you are able to get these five things down, it is going to make a world of difference. It's gonna be like night and day, and you're gonna make the rest of your life a lot easier. But before we get into that, let's make sure to gently tap that like button. Let's set a goal for 1,000 likes on this video. Hit the subscribe button. Only about 20% of you are subscribed. We could do better than that. Come on now. And also ring that notification bell so that you never miss out on a video. But anyways, let's get into it. Number one on this list is to learn to play defense before you learn how to play offense. Right, and I'm not talking about basketball or football. This is just a money metaphor. So basically what this means is learn how to save and budget your money, right? So if offense is making your money and then also investing your money, then defense is saving money and learning how to budget. And the only problem with offense is during a lot of your life, while you're young specifically, you don't really have all that many opportunities to make money. Usually you have to go to college, you have to learn something, maybe like an apprenticeship to learn a trade. You'd have to start a business and usually the first few years you're not gonna be making very much. So it's very difficult to learn how to make money and even more difficult to learn how to invest it while you're young, just because you don't have all that many opportunities. But what is just as important as learning how to make money and learning how to invest your money is learning how to keep it, right? Learning how to budget so that you can actually save money and keep the money that you make and invest. And just to prove this in case you don't believe me, 70% of professional athletes end up going broke and 80% of lottery winners end up filing bankruptcy. These are people who have millions and millions of dollars. They have so much money that they could probably have like 10 or 20 or a hundred different people retire on the amount of money that they make during their career or in the case of lottery, how much money they get from the payout. And yet in many cases, they still end up losing it all and they go bankrupt. Why is this? Because they had the offense part down, they made all that money, but they didn't have the defense part down. They didn't understand how to budget and save. So the defense part is something you can practice at any time during your life. You can learn the basics of budgeting and you can learn the basics of saving money. But that brings me to number two on the list, which is budget, but don't spend too much time on it. Now I see a lot of YouTube videos where people basically get super, super detailed with their budget. Like they're tracking every single penny that goes in and out of their account and in and out of their pocket or their wallet. And some people will even say, I spend like an hour a day doing my budget. And to me, that is just absolutely ridiculous. Avoid time-wasting tasks where you're trying to kind of like manage your money too much. So this would include budgeting, of course, because if you spend like an extra hour a day on your budget in order to save like an extra dollar or two per day, I mean, that's really not gonna make that much of a difference. You could just use that amount of time that you were budgeting and like pick up extra hours or go do some kind of side hustle. And even if you're making like five, 10 bucks an hour, you're gonna end up making more money doing things that way. But this also includes things like extreme couponing, which in my opinion, is usually going to be a total waste of time. You know, you spend like an extra 10 hours a week in order to end up saving $50, that's $5 an hour. You could have just worked like a minimum wage job and you would have made a lot more than that. Now that's a great thing to do if for whatever reason you don't have access to a job, but if you're able to work a job, you can just work extra hours, do some kind of side hustle, do Uber, you know, anything like that. And it would be more worth your time than spending all this time sorting through different magazines and newspapers and stuff like that. Another example of one of these things is wasting too much time thinking about credit card points. So there's like a very basic credit card strategy that you should understand. You know, I have a few credit cards and I use them strategically to, you know, save money. But some people just go way overboard with it and they have like 20 different credit cards and they're monitoring like, oh, during January, February and March, this one is gonna, you know, give me 3% back on gas, which is a little bit better than the 2.5%. So they're like constantly like switching their credit cards out and just, they spend all this time on like credit card forums, reading about other people's experiences. And they could have just taken all that time that they did that and learned a skill that they could have used to made like way more money, right, and instead they ended up saving like maybe an extra 100 bucks a year or something, right? But they could have like, like I said, learned a skill to make more money or they could have just worked extra hours. So I'm all for credit card points and everything like that. You should definitely do that, but do it smart. Don't waste too much time on it. Just get the basics down, you know, just get a couple of really good credit cards and you are good to go. And there's honestly a lot of other things that I could use as examples of things where you're, you know, wasting your time doing too much of something. But yeah, I'll go ahead and leave it at that. Number three on the list is going to be start investing as early as you possibly can, even if it's just a tiny amount of money. It used to be that most people did not start investing until they were in their 30s. And a significant reason why that was is many of the brokerages had minimum amounts that they required for you to open an account. So it would be something like $5,000, $10,000, et cetera. And the truth is a lot of people, especially these days with student loans and house payments, et cetera, they aren't gonna have $10,000 of disposable income for a long period, a lot of the time until they're in their 30s. But these days there are so many different investment options for you. You could literally pick up your phone and download an investment option right now and start investing. And not only would you have the incredible power of compound interest on your side, which is basically where during your lifetime, $1 is gonna turn into like $10 or $20 down the line if you invest it long enough. Whereas if you wait until your 30s, 40s, or 50s to start investing, that $1 might only turn into like $5. Now the magic of compounding investing is super important and I think that's awesome. But I think most people have heard about that before. If you invest like $500 a month into a Roth IRA, for instance, all the way through your lifetime, you are going to be retiring as a tax-free millionaire. This has been proven over and over again. There's Roth IRA calculators all over the internet. You can do the calculation yourself. You are going to retire with millions and millions of dollars but I think even more than the power of compound interest, it's just the simple fact that you get started investing, right? When you open up your phone and you see that your investments are going up, like, oh, you open it up, you see your investment going up, you get this a little adrenaline rush. It feels really good. And there's really just a psychological aspect to getting started investing as soon as you can and it gets kind of addicting. And that is a very good addiction for you to have as long as you invest wisely, of course. So the sooner you start doing it, the sooner you're gonna get more comfortable with it and that is going to lead to you really getting into investing. And then it's gonna be so much easier for you to do things like number one and number two, which is save and budget because the more you save and the more you budget, the more you're going to get to invest. And it's also going to be easier for you to do the next two on the list. And the next one is going to be number four, get a job. Right, I know I probably sound like a boomer saying this but this is a very important thing for you to do during college. And honestly, if you can during high school. I would say during college, getting a job is even more important than having good grades. And the reason for that is because if you don't have work experience, it's so much more difficult for somebody to train you. And I know from personal experience, I've trained people who worked while they were going to school and I've trained people who didn't work while they were going to school. It was their very first job and the difference is night and day. And it wasn't because the people who worked were much smarter than the people who didn't work. It was simply just experience. It is so much more difficult to train somebody who has zero work experience versus somebody who has some. And hiring managers, business owners, et cetera, they all know this. So not only are you going to learn key skills and these are kind of soft skills, things you can't really learn out of a book. You just have to be there, you have to do it. It's on the job training type of skill sets. So not only are you gonna learn those skills but on top of that, it's going to look so much better on your resume when somebody sees that you were working during college. So even if you can pick up like, seriously, just like even if it's like a half shift every two weeks or a half shift every month, as long as you get to say you worked part-time during college, it's gonna look a heck of a lot better than someone who didn't work at all. And even if you're somebody who's like, you know what, Shane?

Speaker 2: I'm going to college but I don't plan on getting a job. I'm gonna be an entrepreneur, okay? I'm never gonna work for anybody else.

Speaker 1: I think that's a really bad mindset because how are you gonna be able to be a good boss yourself if you've never been an employee before, right? Like it's so much easier for you to put yourself in somebody's shoes if you've been in their situation before like it's so much easier to be a good manager if you've had a bad manager or maybe you've had a good manager before and you kind of have seen the contrast between those two. So even if you get a job and it's kind of a crappy job, you don't really enjoy it, that's gonna set a bar for you. And so in the future, if you get a better job, it's gonna feel a lot better. You're gonna actually appreciate it because you know that it's better. And then on top of that, you're just gonna learn so much no matter what direction you end up going. So definitely get a job during college without a doubt, no brainer, just do it. Number five on the list is going to be to invest in skills and education. Now, education is one of those things where college used to have a monopoly on it, right? Pretty much the only place you could get educated was college, but it's no longer like that, right? There's so many different areas that you can get educated in. There's lots of different websites out there where you can take courses from people who are pros at whatever they're teaching. It's also surprisingly and ironically, cheaper in many cases to get one-on-one teaching from somebody than to actually go to college where you're gonna have like 40 other students in a classroom to one teacher. No, seriously, like the amount of time that you spend in the classroom with a professor, if you just took that same amount of time, you could pretty easily in many cases just hire somebody who is a professional or who's really good at whatever skill you're trying to learn to coach you one-on-one. And I'm not even kidding about that. These things are out there, they're available. You can look at websites like Fiverr.com. There are people who post it on Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, et cetera, right? So there's so many different ways for you to get educated. College is a great choice depending on the career path you're going down. And then also just learning skills. So another career path you could go down is trade, right? You could become a tradesman, an electrician, a plumber, HVAC mechanic, et cetera. These are skills that are very valuable. They are things that society needs. When somebody's toilet breaks, you gotta fix their toilet, right? Like they're not just gonna leave it like that. They're gonna get that toilet fixed ASAP. And that's why plumbers are so needed. You can also learn skills and go down the entrepreneur route. That is a great route for some people to take as well. Some people have zero interest in that. You just wanna work a nine to five and just live a normal lifestyle and that's great. Some people want to go the entrepreneur route because maybe they want to make more money or maybe they don't wanna make more money. They just wanna be able to do something they're really passionate about and make the same amount of money as they were making in their job or maybe just enough to live. So there's a lot of different reasons that people go for that, but that is another good option as well. But getting a job is great. Investing in skills and getting educated is gonna make it to where you are able to get a job that pays you a lot or you are able to create your own job as an entrepreneur. And all of these things kind of feed into each other, right? So if you get really excited about investing, for instance, that's gonna make you want to make more money, right? And then when you make more money, you're gonna be saving more money and you're gonna be figuring out how to budget all that money. And then that's gonna make you invest even more. And then all of a sudden you get to retire early and enjoy the rest of your life on a tropical island, hopefully. That's all I have for this video. Hope you enjoyed it. Check out my other videos right here. I made them just for you. Go ahead, gently tap that like button, hit the subscribe button, ring the notification bell, and comment down below any thoughts, comments, criticisms, et cetera, that you have on the video. And I will see you next time.