Hey Gen Z friends,
Welcome to adulting and the world of personal finance! As Generation Z, you have the incredible advantage of time on your side when it comes to investing and reaching financial independence.
Leverage your youth as a time of opportunity and learning, thinking boldly about how to create the financial future you want.
This two-part guide will give you a crash course on all the money basics you need to know as you start your career and financial independence.
So What is Financial Independence?
Afford Anything is a movement against the standard advice that you should shackle yourself to a desk for 40 years, buy crap on credit, and pat yourself on the back if you save 10 percent for retirement. Ugh.
When I was 21, I bought a car on Craigslist for $400.
That’s not a typo. I didn’t put the decimal point in the wrong place. My car cost four hundred dollars. I negotiated it down from the asking price of $450.
I drove it for a year and a half, and I didn’t put a dime into it other than standard oil changes. Of course, I didn’t drive much.
Most of the time, I walked everywhere. To lead that pedestrian lifestyle, I needed to live in the center of town. But square footage in the center of town is expensive, so I lived in a tiny apartment. It was so small that I could reach my kitchen sink from my bed. I could stand with one foot on my mattress and wash the dishes.
When people hear about those days, they often say: “Your life must have sucked.”
You know what sucks? Sitting in a cubicle all day. Wasting your life in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Missing your family because you need to work late.
My life was actually pretty awesome during those first few years. I hung out with friends. I snowboarded. I grew plants and read books and had long, leisurely breakfasts.
I had zero debt and a sky-high savings rate. I stashed fifteen percent of the income from my day job into my 401(k); I wrote freelance articles during the evenings and weekends as a side hustle and stashed every penny, after taxes, into my travel-the-world fund.
Every time someone looked at my junky old car or my microscopic apartment and said, “Wow, that sucks,” I’d think:
You know what sucks? NOT having the choice to bike across Spain, ride a camel near the Pyramids, snorkel the Great Barrier Reef, view the Taj Mahal, see the Colosseum in Rome, check out Komodo Dragons in Indonesia, ride bikes in Burma, scuba-dive in Thailand, taste my way across Vietnam — all of which I did, and much more, by age 25.
Those experiences are leagues better than living in a gorgeous home.
To be clear: This proposition won’t always be an “either/or.” If you have the money to enjoy both (world travel and creature comforts at home), that’s awesome. (I easily have that type of money now — which is why I’m a massive advocate of ramping up your income and investing like a warrior.)
Investing, real estate, building businesses, creating passive income — these are self-sustaining long-term successes. Learning to be a top performer is crucial for the long game. This allows you to create wealth, which leads to financial freedom. And once you achieve complete freedom, you can enjoy anything.
But that’s the long game.
For the moment, living according to the above principles will help you focus on the short game: hopping onto an airplane and launching your next adventure.
Can you continue living with roommates instead of having your own place? Keep driving a used car? Resist pressure to overspend on status items? Delay major purchases like a house?
Making short-term sacrifices by hacking your housing, transportation, and lifestyle costs buys you long-term freedom.
As Gen-Zs, you have a tremendous opportunity – if you start investing now and living below your means, financial independence could be achievable in your 30s or 40s.
I know it feels daunting. Most people your age aren’t thinking about this stuff yet. But as an early adopter willing to think long-term, you’ll have an incredible edge.
Then channel that surplus into assets that compound and produce passive streams of income. After a decade or so, you’ll hit an inflection point where your money is working harder than you ever could by trading hours for dollars.
That’s when you get to reap the rewards and design your ideal lifestyle. This probably sounds boring and nerdy if it’s the first time you’re hearing it. But trust me, nothing beats the feeling of “adulting” on your own terms, with no boss or debt holding you back!
Source: Afford Anything
