Here is part 1 of the 30 money lessons by 30 years old series! I wanted to talk about some lessons I’ve learned since I’ve recently turned 30 :). Let me know what you guys think!
✅ Track your net worth free through Personal Capital: https://personalcapital.go2cloud.org/SHRg
💰30 MONEY LESSONS BY 30 Years Old (PART 1 Things to Learn About Money )
Transcription
Below is a transcription of the podcast. This transcription was taken from Otter.ai so it might not be completely accurate:
Sharon Tseung 0:00
Hey guys, it’s Sharon from digital nomad quest and today we’re gonna talk about 30 money lessons to learn by 30. If you guys are new to this channel, welcome, I’m all about teaching y’all how to build passive income become financially free and design your best lives. So if you guys are interested in that, make sure to subscribe and hit the bell button to be notified on my latest videos. So I wanted to create this video because I recently turned 30 back in October, but I wanted to split up this video into two. So this is going to be part one, and then the next one will have the next 15 lessons, I’m splitting it up with 15 and 15. Because I thought that fitting 30 would be too much in one video. So hopefully 15 will allow you to kind of absorb everything in this video and comprehend it better rather than putting all 30 at once. Now let’s just get right into it. So first one I want to just mention everyone is on their own journey. A lot of people make the mistake of comparing their own journeys with other people’s journeys. It’s so easy to do it because you know, there’s Instagram, there’s Facebook, everything like that you see when people buy new houses or get a new job and everything like that. So it’s just so easy to compare yourself to other people’s journeys. In reality, it’s really impossible to compare because everyone’s backgrounds are different. Everyone’s situations growing up is different. And everyone’s goals are different as well. Some people came from families with more money, some people came from families with less money, other people might have an advantage with financial education. Maybe their parents taught them different things from a young age, while other people might want billions of dollars. And other people might not even want that in their lives. I would say that if you end up comparing and competing with others, you just end up less satisfied and your journeys just way harder. You’ll start feeling guilty about past mistakes, you won’t be satisfied about where you are at, you’ll always constantly think oh, maybe you should have more and more and more. It’s just easier to go on your own path. Think about what your intentions are, What’s your purpose, and what’s your number in order to kind of create freedom and maybe support your families or whatever is your goal, right. So just figure out your goals and your intention. This leads me to point number two, make sure to have an abundance mindset. When you’re in a place of abundance, you can feel really thankful for what you have. And you’ll be at peace with how much you have. You also think that growing your income your assets, and saving and investing is really doable. Instead of thinking it’s not possible, you’ll start shifting your mindset to think you can do this, I’ve heard so many people just say I can’t do this, I don’t know that information, I’ll never be able to do what you’re doing. Or I’ll never be able to hit millions. I just hear a lot of limiting beliefs all around. And I feel like if people change their mindset to be like, oh, everyone can achieve all the success or I can do that too. It really changes how you take action and everything like that. Once you say that you can’t do something, you really just can’t do that thing. Honestly, that mindset shift will allow you to open yourself up to way more possibilities. And on top of that, if you have an abundance mindset, you won’t be intimidated or jealous by other people’s success and you won’t be jealous of other people’s happiness because you know that their success and happiness does not take away from yourself. It’ll let you feel happier for others and happy about yourself, there is room for everyone to become wealthy and successful, someone else’s journey just doesn’t take away from you. But if you’re coming from a scarcity mindset, you’re always gonna think someone’s gonna take something away from you, this is all you have, and you won’t be able to get this or that and you need to protect what you have. Number three, you should increase your income and lower your expenses. The equation to building wealth is really simple, you have to increase what’s coming in and lower what’s coming out. So it really doesn’t matter if you make a million dollars a year if you don’t save or invest any of it. So make sure you’re always working to increase your income and lower your expenses to build wealth from saving and investing. So number four, you should build passive income streams. One of the ways to increase your income to build that wealth is really to build these passive income streams that work for you. I talk about it a lot in this channel. So here is a list of different methods you can go and sell digital downloads on Etsy. You can sell custom merch on merch by Amazon or do other print on demand platforms. You could also create a YouTube channel or a blog or a podcast and you make money through ads, affiliates, sponsorships, you can even create your own courses or products or ebooks, you can cashflow that way. Or you can do Amazon FBA where you can work with manufacturers who will ship over your products to the Amazon warehouse and every time you get orders, Amazon will fulfill your orders for you. So it’s pretty passive. There are many ways to create cash flow for yourself. And if you just rely on your main source of income, it can be hard because if anything happens if you get laid off, it’ll be unsafe for you. It’s good to have these multiple streams. So if anything happens, you’re safe, which leads me to number five, you might want to look for part time positions and even better look for remote positions that you can do online. You know, during the days of the pandemic, a lot of people are working remotely and understanding that you can do work on your laptop and you can get a lot of things done. You don’t need to be there in person. There’s a lot of positions that you can do like marketing, customer support, virtual assistant work, coding copywriting, there’s so many different positions that you can do online and you can look for this work onlike Upwork or Craigslist or freelancer.com. All of these points I mentioned in number four number five are really to increase your income you know if you save a lot of money That’s great, but it’s all capped, right? It’s capped at how much money you actually make. If you make $50,000 a year, that’s the max, you can be saving after taxes. But if you’re increasing your income, you’re increasing the amount you can save to build that wealth. Number six, there are actually high paying jobs that don’t require degrees. So a lot of people feel limited because they didn’t go to college. But there’s so many different online resources now that can allow you to find high paying jobs. I know someone who even started doing copywriting on Fiverr, you think $5 a gig, right? You’re not gonna make anything. But with Fiverr, you can create these packages, or you can charge more money and the more clients you get, the more you can charge because you’re building that portfolio. Now that person is making $300,000 a year doing copywriting it doesn’t sound doable, but she didn’t have to have a college degree to do that she offered a gig on Fiverr and was able to increase her income like that. But if you’re not trying to be a copywriter, you can try to be a coder. So people think you need a college degree to become a coder. However, there are many boot camps actually, that teach you how to code for some of them, you might need to pay a decent amount of money to get in there are actually free ones though, where you can actually bump your salary up a lot after doing it and then getting a job through programming. So I have multiple friends. And even my brother went into like Hack Reactor and got a high paying coding job, though they did have college degrees, I would say that if you know the skills, if you’re a really good coder, you can prove that in job interviews, I’m sure you will be able to land a job. And with the interviews for coding, they just care about if you’re able to solve the challenges if you’re really good at it. And usually a lot of that work requires you to just study a lot and like really grind out those puzzles in order to be really good at coding. And if you’re able to do that you’re going to be able to land a high paying job. Same with marketing. So I would say that, first of all, I didn’t have a degree in marketing, I was a psychology and music major, but I was able to get a high paying job in marketing, but it did require me to move up a lot. And I also had to study a lot on the side and take internships do different things in order to build on my resume. And I was able to get my income higher and higher as I changed jobs. But I would say that even though I had a degree, you don’t need a degree to get a marketing position. If you study the different skills that are required. If you study Facebook ads, Google AdWords, Google Analytics, social media, copywriting, graphic design, like all of these things are going to help you land a job. And I would advise that if you can create a blog and a website and show proof that you’re able to get traffic on it and get followers and things like that. It’ll really impress employers, if you already have done the marketing for your own kind of side business or website and show numbers to them. Show that you actually know your stuff. You know how to run Facebook ads, you know how to run Google ads, in order to get that traffic and get the sales number seven, you should definitely track your net worth, I started tracking my net worth around 2015, I would say and I haven’t stopped since then I use a spreadsheet. I also have personal capital, which I’ll link below personal capital lets you link to your bank accounts and basically see a bigger picture of your income, your expenses, how much you currently have, what your current net worth is, it has a chart to show you your cash flow and everything like that, which is great. You can also see kind of your expenses of how much you are spending and how you can reduce that by tracking your net worth, you can really see where your money is going to and how your progress is every month. I track this pretty regularly on my spreadsheet as well just to see because I also have, you know, real estate and other assets that I want to track. So it’s just exciting for me to see I even used to go down to expense numbers where I had a spreadsheet. While I was nomadic. For two years, I tracked every single thing I bought, I track how much I spent on food, how much is my entertainment, transportation, everything. So I could see how much I was spending at each country that I was traveling to. By doing this, I was able to reduce my numbers a lot because I was aware I was aware how much I was spending and I only ended up spending 14 $100 a month while traveling. So if you budget and you really track your net worth, it’s going to really help you a lot to become aware of how you are financially and where you want to get to and basically make it a process where you have goals and milestones and kind of keep tracking your progress along the way to see how far you are and where you’re going to go. Number eight you should increase your assets and now your liabilities if you really want to build your equity, increase your assets and not liabilities. And what I mean by that is when it comes to liabilities, you want to make sure you don’t have a ton of recurring fees and expenses. So you should avoid things with recurring fees as much as you can. Which leads me to number nine car loans are liabilities and depreciating assets. So when I bought my first car, I was really against buying a new car because I didn’t even care what it looked likeI could drive something beat up as long as it’s safe and I’d be fine. I don’t care that much about looks when it comes to that. So I bought a 2012 Nissan Sentra for like 60 $700 for this area. It was a pretty good price like I had done a bunch of research at the time is a good idea and outside influences telling me I should buy a new car but I decided against it because I knew that once you drive your car out the driveway, the value Have the car already depreciates by a lot. So to me, it’s kind of crazy that people pay off a monthly car loan for years and years and years with decent amount of interest. They’re also paying auto insurance and everything like that, well, auto insurance is unavoidable. But you know, if you have a long car loan, and you are basically paying monthly for something that’s decreasing in value every day. So essentially, with cars, I try to pay as little as possible, but I want to make sure that it’s still safe. Number 10. If you want to buy things, you should buy things that are in line with your life. So you need to ask questions like How much are you spending shopping, and is it in line with your values, if your values are like your kids, and you are worried about spending too much on daycare, but you’re spending the same amount on like bags and shoes, maybe you need to reprioritize things you need to make sure the way you spend money is in line with your values. Another example if you are really into health, and you want to make sure your diets good, but you would rather spend $5 on coffee and not $1 extra on avocados, maybe you need to think about your purchases. Another example is what I spend money on usually will bring me cash love back other things I might spend on his gear for my music. So I like creating music creation and art, I love that type of stuff. So I’m okay with spending some money on that. So I don’t really spend that much money. So if I do spend it on something, it’s either in myself in my business or in things that I love in value number 11, your biggest expense is going to be your housing costs. This is probably obvious, you know, a lot of people spend a lot of money on rent on their mortgage. And I try to reduce that as much as possible. There are different ways you can reduce your living costs by house hacking, which is basically buying a property and maybe renting out rooms. Or maybe if you bought a multi family home, you can rent out the units that will help you reduce your mortgage and possibly even break even or cash flow while you’re living. You know, you can also live at home. So one of the things I did, I lived at home for the longest time, it was like not a cool thing to do, you know, everyone had moved out, but I was still living my parents. And luckily my parents wanted me to stay at home for as long as I wanted. Like, even when I moved out, they’re really sad and like upset. So it’s just different values. Because Asian tradition, I think they prefer to have their kids stay with them for a longer period of time. So I’m lucky in that sense, because that allowed me to save a lot of the money I was making. So maybe if you are trying to make sure you are building wealth, maybe you want to lower your living expenses by living at home, maybe paying a few 100 to your parents or something a month, but not paying a ton of money on rent, and then maybe saving up for a home that you can buy in the future and do the whole house hacking thing. Another way I kind of reduced living expenses with traveling the world actually. So when I traveled for two years, I spent only 14 $100 a month for everything travel, accommodations, transportation, food, entertainment, everything like that. So the amount I ended up spending was actually way less than if I had rented you know, in the Bay Area. So if you can, you should always reduce your living expenses because it ends up taking most of your income away. Number 12. Recurring fees can add up. So I kind of mentioned this before lower your liabilities. But you know, just anything that has monthly expenses, you should be aware of a lot of people end up buying like a magazine subscription over here, or Netflix and Hulu subscription and a gym membership. And then they download a bunch of apps and then they pay monthly for a bunch of these apps. And then it just really adds up, especially if you don’t track it. So make sure you’re tracking this stuff, make sure you see how much it’s adding up. I know that my business expenses add up a lot, I make sure to track these things and kind of remove certain ones that I realized I don’t need as much or I can reduce here and there. It’s important to kind of be aware of these expenses because they can really add up number 13 you got to build up your credit score bad credit can keep you from landing a job getting an apartment and penalize you with high interest rates on loans. In order to build up your credit score, you should always pay off your credit cards on time, don’t miss payments, because the interest rates will go up, your credit scores will go down and you want to build a longer credit history, you should also limit the amount of times you pull your credit score. So number 14, the 50 3020 rule is a good way to save money, especially if you’re having trouble saving. So this basically means that 50% of your after tax income should go to your needs. So that means your rent or mortgage payments, your utilities, your car payments, groceries insurance and minimum debt payments. And then 30% should go to your wants. So that might mean things that aren’t essential, maybe some fancy meals, clothes,entertainment, things like that. And then 20% should go to your savings and investments that may include contributing at three to six months of emergency fund expenses, your IRA account or other investments. And I would say this basic rule of thumb, but if you can increase the amount you put into your savings investments, it’ll pay you back generously, so make sure you try to save as much as you can. And number 15 Lastly, I would say that retiring early does not always equate to happiness. You know, something I learned was I always aim for early financial freedom because I thought that would solve all my problems I would have all the time in the world to do everything I wanted to do. But if you don’t have purpose or intention, you don’t know why you’re doing things you will not be fulfilled. So when I was in Chiang Mai, I basically felt like I was financially free because I was making way more than I was spending and I could just do whatever I wanted. Because I had cash flow coming in from passive income businesses that hadn’t built, what I found was it wasn’t fulfilling, just thinking about increasing my numbers for passive income. Instead of having something that I was working towards or some purpose with all my actions. It really made me realize that if you don’t have that purpose, if you don’t have intention behind your actions, you won’t be fulfilled if you retire so soon. So like I mentioned before, always live with the intention. Just know that financial freedom is a means to an end, it’s not the goal, okay, it’s not the thing that’s going to make you eternally happy. It’s just something that will free up your time with your loved ones and on creative projects, which is really good if you know how you’re going to use that time wisely.Unknown Speaker 15:47
So hope you guysSharon Tseung 15:48
enjoy these first 15 money lessons of the 30 money lessons by 30 and I’m going to continue this in my next video where we’re going to talk about some other lessons that I’ve learned by this time and I hope you guys enjoyed this video Comment below and let me know if there’s a lesson that you didn’t know that really helped you and make sure to smash the like button subscribe, hit the bell button to be notified of my latest videos and I’ll see you guys in the next one.
Hey guys, it’s Sharon from digital nomad quest and today we’re gonna talk about 30 money lessons to learn by 30. If you guys are new to this channel, welcome, I’m all about teaching y’all how to build passive income become financially free and design your best lives. So if you guys are interested in that, make sure to subscribe and hit the bell button to be notified on my latest videos. So I wanted to create this video because I recently turned 30 back in October, but I wanted to split up this video into two. So this is going to be part one, and then the next one will have the next 15 lessons, I’m splitting it up with 15 and 15. Because I thought that fitting 30 would be too much in one video. So hopefully 15 will allow you to kind of absorb everything in this video and comprehend it better rather than putting all 30 at once. Now let’s just get right into it. So first one I want to just mention everyone is on their own journey. A lot of people make the mistake of comparing their own journeys with other people’s journeys. It’s so easy to do it because you know, there’s Instagram, there’s Facebook, everything like that you see when people buy new houses or get a new job and everything like that. So it’s just so easy to compare yourself to other people’s journeys. In reality, it’s really impossible to compare because everyone’s backgrounds are different. Everyone’s situations growing up is different. And everyone’s goals are different as well. Some people came from families with more money, some people came from families with less money, other people might have an advantage with financial education. Maybe their parents taught them different things from a young age, while other people might want billions of dollars. And other people might not even want that in their lives. I would say that if you end up comparing and competing with others, you just end up less satisfied and your journeys just way harder. You’ll start feeling guilty about past mistakes, you won’t be satisfied about where you are at, you’ll always constantly think oh, maybe you should have more and more and more. It’s just easier to go on your own path. Think about what your intentions are, What’s your purpose, and what’s your number in order to kind of create freedom and maybe support your families or whatever is your goal, right. So just figure out your goals and your intention. This leads me to point number two, make sure to have an abundance mindset. When you’re in a place of abundance, you can feel really thankful for what you have. And you’ll be at peace with how much you have. You also think that growing your income your assets, and saving and investing is really doable. Instead of thinking it’s not possible, you’ll start shifting your mindset to think you can do this, I’ve heard so many people just say I can’t do this, I don’t know that information, I’ll never be able to do what you’re doing. Or I’ll never be able to hit millions. I just hear a lot of limiting beliefs all around. And I feel like if people change their mindset to be like, oh, everyone can achieve all the success or I can do that too. It really changes how you take action and everything like that. Once you say that you can’t do something, you really just can’t do that thing. Honestly, that mindset shift will allow you to open yourself up to way more possibilities. And on top of that, if you have an abundance mindset, you won’t be intimidated or jealous by other people’s success and you won’t be jealous of other people’s happiness because you know that their success and happiness does not take away from yourself. It’ll let you feel happier for others and happy about yourself, there is room for everyone to become wealthy and successful, someone else’s journey just doesn’t take away from you. But if you’re coming from a scarcity mindset, you’re always gonna think someone’s gonna take something away from you, this is all you have, and you won’t be able to get this or that and you need to protect what you have. Number three, you should increase your income and lower your expenses. The equation to building wealth is really simple, you have to increase what’s coming in and lower what’s coming out. So it really doesn’t matter if you make a million dollars a year if you don’t save or invest any of it. So make sure you’re always working to increase your income and lower your expenses to build wealth from saving and investing. So number four, you should build passive income streams. One of the ways to increase your income to build that wealth is really to build these passive income streams that work for you. I talk about it a lot in this channel. So here is a list of different methods you can go and sell digital downloads on Etsy. You can sell custom merch on merch by Amazon or do other print on demand platforms. You could also create a YouTube channel or a blog or a podcast and you make money through ads, affiliates, sponsorships, you can even create your own courses or products or ebooks, you can cashflow that way. Or you can do Amazon FBA where you can work with manufacturers who will ship over your products to the Amazon warehouse and every time you get orders, Amazon will fulfill your orders for you. So it’s pretty passive. There are many ways to create cash flow for yourself. And if you just rely on your main source of income, it can be hard because if anything happens if you get laid off, it’ll be unsafe for you. It’s good to have these multiple streams. So if anything happens, you’re safe, which leads me to number five, you might want to look for part time positions and even better look for remote positions that you can do online. You know, during the days of the pandemic, a lot of people are working remotely and understanding that you can do work on your laptop and you can get a lot of things done. You don’t need to be there in person. There’s a lot of positions that you can do like marketing, customer support, virtual assistant work, coding copywriting, there’s so many different positions that you can do online and you can look for this work onlike Upwork or Craigslist or freelancer.com. All of these points I mentioned in number four number five are really to increase your income you know if you save a lot of money That’s great, but it’s all capped, right? It’s capped at how much money you actually make. If you make $50,000 a year, that’s the max, you can be saving after taxes. But if you’re increasing your income, you’re increasing the amount you can save to build that wealth. Number six, there are actually high paying jobs that don’t require degrees. So a lot of people feel limited because they didn’t go to college. But there’s so many different online resources now that can allow you to find high paying jobs. I know someone who even started doing copywriting on Fiverr, you think $5 a gig, right? You’re not gonna make anything. But with Fiverr, you can create these packages, or you can charge more money and the more clients you get, the more you can charge because you’re building that portfolio. Now that person is making $300,000 a year doing copywriting it doesn’t sound doable, but she didn’t have to have a college degree to do that she offered a gig on Fiverr and was able to increase her income like that. But if you’re not trying to be a copywriter, you can try to be a coder. So people think you need a college degree to become a coder. However, there are many boot camps actually, that teach you how to code for some of them, you might need to pay a decent amount of money to get in there are actually free ones though, where you can actually bump your salary up a lot after doing it and then getting a job through programming. So I have multiple friends. And even my brother went into like Hack Reactor and got a high paying coding job, though they did have college degrees, I would say that if you know the skills, if you’re a really good coder, you can prove that in job interviews, I’m sure you will be able to land a job. And with the interviews for coding, they just care about if you’re able to solve the challenges if you’re really good at it. And usually a lot of that work requires you to just study a lot and like really grind out those puzzles in order to be really good at coding. And if you’re able to do that you’re going to be able to land a high paying job. Same with marketing. So I would say that, first of all, I didn’t have a degree in marketing, I was a psychology and music major, but I was able to get a high paying job in marketing, but it did require me to move up a lot. And I also had to study a lot on the side and take internships do different things in order to build on my resume. And I was able to get my income higher and higher as I changed jobs. But I would say that even though I had a degree, you don’t need a degree to get a marketing position. If you study the different skills that are required. If you study Facebook ads, Google AdWords, Google Analytics, social media, copywriting, graphic design, like all of these things are going to help you land a job. And I would advise that if you can create a blog and a website and show proof that you’re able to get traffic on it and get followers and things like that. It’ll really impress employers, if you already have done the marketing for your own kind of side business or website and show numbers to them. Show that you actually know your stuff. You know how to run Facebook ads, you know how to run Google ads, in order to get that traffic and get the sales number seven, you should definitely track your net worth, I started tracking my net worth around 2015, I would say and I haven’t stopped since then I use a spreadsheet. I also have personal capital, which I’ll link below personal capital lets you link to your bank accounts and basically see a bigger picture of your income, your expenses, how much you currently have, what your current net worth is, it has a chart to show you your cash flow and everything like that, which is great. You can also see kind of your expenses of how much you are spending and how you can reduce that by tracking your net worth, you can really see where your money is going to and how your progress is every month. I track this pretty regularly on my spreadsheet as well just to see because I also have, you know, real estate and other assets that I want to track. So it’s just exciting for me to see I even used to go down to expense numbers where I had a spreadsheet. While I was nomadic. For two years, I tracked every single thing I bought, I track how much I spent on food, how much is my entertainment, transportation, everything. So I could see how much I was spending at each country that I was traveling to. By doing this, I was able to reduce my numbers a lot because I was aware I was aware how much I was spending and I only ended up spending 14 $100 a month while traveling. So if you budget and you really track your net worth, it’s going to really help you a lot to become aware of how you are financially and where you want to get to and basically make it a process where you have goals and milestones and kind of keep tracking your progress along the way to see how far you are and where you’re going to go. Number eight you should increase your assets and now your liabilities if you really want to build your equity, increase your assets and not liabilities. And what I mean by that is when it comes to liabilities, you want to make sure you don’t have a ton of recurring fees and expenses. So you should avoid things with recurring fees as much as you can. Which leads me to number nine car loans are liabilities and depreciating assets. So when I bought my first car, I was really against buying a new car because I didn’t even care what it looked likeI could drive something beat up as long as it’s safe and I’d be fine. I don’t care that much about looks when it comes to that. So I bought a 2012 Nissan Sentra for like 60 $700 for this area. It was a pretty good price like I had done a bunch of research at the time is a good idea and outside influences telling me I should buy a new car but I decided against it because I knew that once you drive your car out the driveway, the value Have the car already depreciates by a lot. So to me, it’s kind of crazy that people pay off a monthly car loan for years and years and years with decent amount of interest. They’re also paying auto insurance and everything like that, well, auto insurance is unavoidable. But you know, if you have a long car loan, and you are basically paying monthly for something that’s decreasing in value every day. So essentially, with cars, I try to pay as little as possible, but I want to make sure that it’s still safe. Number 10. If you want to buy things, you should buy things that are in line with your life. So you need to ask questions like How much are you spending shopping, and is it in line with your values, if your values are like your kids, and you are worried about spending too much on daycare, but you’re spending the same amount on like bags and shoes, maybe you need to reprioritize things you need to make sure the way you spend money is in line with your values. Another example if you are really into health, and you want to make sure your diets good, but you would rather spend $5 on coffee and not $1 extra on avocados, maybe you need to think about your purchases. Another example is what I spend money on usually will bring me cash love back other things I might spend on his gear for my music. So I like creating music creation and art, I love that type of stuff. So I’m okay with spending some money on that. So I don’t really spend that much money. So if I do spend it on something, it’s either in myself in my business or in things that I love in value number 11, your biggest expense is going to be your housing costs. This is probably obvious, you know, a lot of people spend a lot of money on rent on their mortgage. And I try to reduce that as much as possible. There are different ways you can reduce your living costs by house hacking, which is basically buying a property and maybe renting out rooms. Or maybe if you bought a multi family home, you can rent out the units that will help you reduce your mortgage and possibly even break even or cash flow while you’re living. You know, you can also live at home. So one of the things I did, I lived at home for the longest time, it was like not a cool thing to do, you know, everyone had moved out, but I was still living my parents. And luckily my parents wanted me to stay at home for as long as I wanted. Like, even when I moved out, they’re really sad and like upset. So it’s just different values. Because Asian tradition, I think they prefer to have their kids stay with them for a longer period of time. So I’m lucky in that sense, because that allowed me to save a lot of the money I was making. So maybe if you are trying to make sure you are building wealth, maybe you want to lower your living expenses by living at home, maybe paying a few 100 to your parents or something a month, but not paying a ton of money on rent, and then maybe saving up for a home that you can buy in the future and do the whole house hacking thing. Another way I kind of reduced living expenses with traveling the world actually. So when I traveled for two years, I spent only 14 $100 a month for everything travel, accommodations, transportation, food, entertainment, everything like that. So the amount I ended up spending was actually way less than if I had rented you know, in the Bay Area. So if you can, you should always reduce your living expenses because it ends up taking most of your income away. Number 12. Recurring fees can add up. So I kind of mentioned this before lower your liabilities. But you know, just anything that has monthly expenses, you should be aware of a lot of people end up buying like a magazine subscription over here, or Netflix and Hulu subscription and a gym membership. And then they download a bunch of apps and then they pay monthly for a bunch of these apps. And then it just really adds up, especially if you don’t track it. So make sure you’re tracking this stuff, make sure you see how much it’s adding up. I know that my business expenses add up a lot, I make sure to track these things and kind of remove certain ones that I realized I don’t need as much or I can reduce here and there. It’s important to kind of be aware of these expenses because they can really add up number 13 you got to build up your credit score bad credit can keep you from landing a job getting an apartment and penalize you with high interest rates on loans. In order to build up your credit score, you should always pay off your credit cards on time, don’t miss payments, because the interest rates will go up, your credit scores will go down and you want to build a longer credit history, you should also limit the amount of times you pull your credit score. So number 14, the 50 3020 rule is a good way to save money, especially if you’re having trouble saving. So this basically means that 50% of your after tax income should go to your needs. So that means your rent or mortgage payments, your utilities, your car payments, groceries insurance and minimum debt payments. And then 30% should go to your wants. So that might mean things that aren’t essential, maybe some fancy meals, clothes,entertainment, things like that. And then 20% should go to your savings and investments that may include contributing at three to six months of emergency fund expenses, your IRA account or other investments. And I would say this basic rule of thumb, but if you can increase the amount you put into your savings investments, it’ll pay you back generously, so make sure you try to save as much as you can. And number 15 Lastly, I would say that retiring early does not always equate to happiness. You know, something I learned was I always aim for early financial freedom because I thought that would solve all my problems I would have all the time in the world to do everything I wanted to do. But if you don’t have purpose or intention, you don’t know why you’re doing things you will not be fulfilled. So when I was in Chiang Mai, I basically felt like I was financially free because I was making way more than I was spending and I could just do whatever I wanted. Because I had cash flow coming in from passive income businesses that hadn’t built, what I found was it wasn’t fulfilling, just thinking about increasing my numbers for passive income. Instead of having something that I was working towards or some purpose with all my actions. It really made me realize that if you don’t have that purpose, if you don’t have intention behind your actions, you won’t be fulfilled if you retire so soon. So like I mentioned before, always live with the intention. Just know that financial freedom is a means to an end, it’s not the goal, okay, it’s not the thing that’s going to make you eternally happy. It’s just something that will free up your time with your loved ones and on creative projects, which is really good if you know how you’re going to use that time wisely.Unknown Speaker 15:47
So hope you guysSharon Tseung 15:48
enjoy these first 15 money lessons of the 30 money lessons by 30 and I’m going to continue this in my next video where we’re going to talk about some other lessons that I’ve learned by this time and I hope you guys enjoyed this video Comment below and let me know if there’s a lesson that you didn’t know that really helped you and make sure to smash the like button subscribe, hit the bell button to be notified of my latest videos and I’ll see you guys in the next one.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
