Lessons About Money From Our Twenties

From Reddit: A thread on the most important financial lesson various people have learned in their twenties.

Many of the lessons are pretty straightforward, according to the ones with the highest votes:

Yes, indeed!

And then there’s the “don’t let the government garnish your wages” lesson:

And this is a specific lesson to specific individuals but if you are that individual it can be a rough realization:

If you’re less inclined to wade through the hundreds of comments in the thread and want to read more of a narrative, here’s an essay by S.L. Bathgate that was one of the first essays we published here.

As for me, after considering it for a bit, it could have been something like start saving for retirement earlier at 21, instead of at 25. But then again, it wasn’t feasible for me until then, and with so many households with no retirement savings, starting those savings at all is a win.

No, the true lesson for me is that I wished I had initiated more conversations about money with the people in my life — with people in my family, with my friends, with the people I work with — because you glean the most information about money that way in a that’s most specific to you. Suze Orman probably doesn’t know what you should be making at work, but you can get that sense by talking with a few trusted colleagues about it. Your friends may know a great tax person, or what an index fund is, or maybe they don’t, but talking about it gets this kind of information out there. At the very least, they’ll know that hey, maybe you can’t afford to split the dinner bill evenly and you only ordered the soup because that’s all you could afford to pay.

What about you?

*Thanks to Tamar for the link!

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