Let’s face it, you are young and you have a bright future ahead of you. As young as 16 years old, you are probably thinking of the many ways you can earn money. You can get a job or you can start a business. The truth is, you have many options that are available to you and many other millenials like you.
Keep in mind that while you may be earning money on your own, without a plan to guide you on where it goes, it can lead you to where you were when you first started without having money of your own.
Here are five ideas to make sure that the money you earn can be both enjoyed and allowed to grow over time.
1. Get insured as early as you can
You may be tempted to say, “I am too young to get my own insurance” and then skip the entire thought of it altogether. When you look at the real purpose of getting insured, it is to make sure that when you become unable to earn money by actively doing your job, the insurance will be there to let you have money to draw when you need it the most.
You will be paying for premiums that will build up in value over time, especially when you get a variable life insurance, which lets your money get invested in a mixture of bonds or stocks that can increase in value when added money steadily. The beauty of starting this when you are young is that you pay less in premiums than when you start later in life.
2. Save 10% of the money that you earn
Say you have $100 and save 10% of that. It will be $10 that you can either deposit in your bank or add to your growing list of investments. Why just 10%?
The practical explanation to this is that it makes saving money easy at the start. When you develop the habit of saving, then you will have adjusted your way of living that will let you have bigger portions of your earnings to be saved more.
3. Invest in real estate
“Why real estate?”, you ask. For the reason that having a home helps ensure that you have a steady safe place to live in for as long as you have it. You may choose to rent your place, together with others to share in the expense of having one and when you already can, choose to get a property that you can call your own.
The value of real estate only grows in time, especially when there are many more developments in the area where your home is located. So keep this in mind as you add this as an option of growing your money.
4. Have multiple sources of income
You may be thinking, “I am a student and I don’t have enough time to juggle more than one job at a time.” Well, that may be true. What you may want to look at now is using technology to help you automate the business that you are doing.
For example, you may invest in getting a website created where people can place an order online for items that can be downloaded for a fee. If you have the talent for it, you may look at selling e-books that you outsource to others to write for a fee or have music created that can be ordered 24/7 from a wide customer base as this is all done digitally.
The possibilities of digital businesses are endless. Use technology to your advantage.
5. Focus on the goal to not lose sight of the reason to save money
You may start to feel tired of doing things like saving money or getting added sources of money which may or may not take too much of your time as mentioned earlier. This can happen especially when you see people your age buying luxury items, going on trips or when monthly bills come in that it makes it harder to keep the momentum of saving going.
You will need to give yourself a reason to keep doing what you do. One easy way to keep the desire to continue saving and investing is to have a vision board which is simply a collection of photos or images that you keep in a place that you regularly see. Those can be a picture of a house you really want, the car you will have or the places that you can go to because you have more money then to enjoy all of those.
True, you may be focused now on the present, especially when you have people to think of or take care of and have bills to pay, but keeping a visual reminder of what you want to achieve in your life keeps you excited and motivated to do what you need to do to get to your dreams plus it allows you to attract them in your life faster than when you don’t allow yourself to think of them often and feel good that those great things are headed your way already..
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