For many of us, young adulthood is a time that’s associated with newfound independence, exciting new experiences and getting to know oneself. However, in addition to young adulthood’s more favorable aspects, there’s something else that’s synonymous with this period: financial insecurity. Many young people live paycheck to paycheck and have little – if any – money put away. With cost of living on the rise as wages continue to stagnate, building your savings as a young adult is liable to seem like a losing battle. Fortunately, with the following tips at your disposal, you’re likely to find that bolstering your finances isn’t quite as hard as you once believed.
Move Back Home
It isn’t hard to see why so many young adults are returning to the nest these days. After all, cost of living has consistently increased as gainful employment opportunities and wages have remained stagnant. Although some young adults are able to finish school with solid careers lined up, many graduates need more time to establish themselves professionally. If you fall into the latter category, temporarily moving back home may prove worth your while.
Even if you’re not keen on the idea of living with your parents as an adult, doing so can be highly conducive to bolstering your savings, particularly if your folks aren’t charging rent. Additionally, if you have reservations about moving back home, you should know that you’re not alone. As of 2019, 50% of Millennials moved back home after college, meaning that a sizable percentage of your peers are in the same boat.
Dine In More Often
Everyone enjoys a good meal out. In addition to getting to enjoy meals at our favorite restaurants, dining out means not having to bother with food prep, cleanup and various other meal-related chores. However, even if you stick to cheaper eateries, dining out on a regular basis can easily eat up hundreds of dollars each month. So, while this approach to feeding yourself may be convenient, it’s far from cost-effective.
With this in mind, make a point of dining in more often. While this will require you to devote a fair amount of time and energy to preparing meals and cleaning up, the amount of money you stand to save is well worth this minor inconvenience. Rather than view this as a punishment, you should regard it as an opportunity to expand your culinary repertoire and learn new recipes. You may even discover that you actually enjoy cooking a lot more than you think. Additionally, if you’ve gotten into the habit of going out for lunch throughout the workweek, start packing your own lunches and bringing them to work with you.
Stick to an Entertainment Budget
It seems like we’re always trying to find ways to stay entertained. From socializing with friends to investing in the latest gadgets, many young adults have no shortage of entertainment options at their disposal. However, given the sheer number of options, it’s easy to get carried away and spend more than you can comfortably afford on personal entertainment.
If you’ve had trouble keeping track of how much you spend on entertainment each month, sit down and work out a manageable entertainment budget – and stick to it. Furthermore, if you find that most of this budget is eaten up by large-scale social events, you may want to start looking at cost-effective ways to stay entertained at home.
Make Money Online
Nowadays making money online is becoming easier by the day. There are numerous apps that can help you earn some money. You can do surveys, play games, watch videos and ads, transcribe speech to text etc. The main difference between those apps are that some of them require quite a lot of effort in order to earn money, while others require almost none. For example Honeygain.
Honeygain is a crowdsourced web intelligence network that will pay you in exchange for your unused bandwidth. You only need to do two things in order to start, and that is download the app and register. Honeygain offers a perfect source of passive income, since it barely requires any attention.
The best practice in order to effectively make money online would be to utilize several of these money making apps. You would need to do your research and figure out what apps are the most suitable for you.
Make Smart Investments
Young adults looking for ways to generate consistent side income should consider making smart investments. Even if you’re unfamiliar with the market, a seasoned investment expert should be able to point you in the right direction and explain why you should invest early. This isn’t to say you should expect to become rich overnight, but if approached in the proper manner, certain investments stand to generate healthy returns.
Saving money as a young adult can seem like a truly arduous undertaking. With cost of living skyrocketing, this is truer now than its ever been. Of course, this isn’t to say that you should simply resign yourself to living paycheck-to-paycheck. While bolstering your savings is liable to present a number of challenges, it’s far from an impossible task. Young adults looking to put away as much money as possible would do well to consider the pointers discussed above.
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