Many new readers have been stopping by Studenomics the last few days from search engines and from other great student resources. I have also received many emails about why I save money, some of the benefits of saving money, and how to motivate people to save money. As a result of all of this and the fact that Financial Literacy Month is coming to an end I figured I owed it to all of you to write about some of the benefits of saving money for a twenty something/recent college graduate:
Travel. If you’re like me then you love to travel and even if you have never traveled before you won’t want to miss out on vacations with friends, family or a signification other. The positive of saving for a vacation is that it is a very slow and steady with process unless you want to travel many times a year.
Retire early. If you do the math for a second you will realize that from age 23 or so until age 65 is over 40 years, 40 years of work. Can you imagine working for 40 years after graduating from college? Well the good news is you don’t have to if you start aggressively contributing to your retirement account at an early age.
Move out. Tired of sneaking friends over late at night? Tired of being woken up 8 in the morning on a Saturday by your parents? Then you should be extremely motivated so save your money because it will allow you to move out sooner. Trust me on this one, as helpful as my family is I’m counting down the days until I get to move out.
Deal with emergencies. Stuff happens, period. Your car will break down eventually, there might be an unexpected medical bill, you may rear end someone, and the list goes on forever. The point is that things happen in life that we may have never expected. You can cry about this all you want but the bottom line is that you need to be prepared by having an emergency fund.
Was this article too basic for you? Are there any other reasons you feel a young person should save money?
Photo: Tracy O
{ 3 trackbacks }
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I like this article alot because I can relate much of it to my personal situation.
Since getting out of debt last month, building a budget and started to save aggresively. The main drivers for me are to move out on my own and run a business full time.
I think saving is great but we all need a motivation for it.
Gotta ask yourself, what is one thing I hate right now?
Say its living at home, well now you are motivated to start saving, learning to budget and pay bills and also make an advance in your career/income.
I am saving a lot of money to do some crazy traveling if I ever get the time. The problem is you mention to save for emergencies, but being so young it’s way too difficult to save for that. With not making any real money, the little I save I am putting towards vacations and soon retirement. Don’t have enough to really go more for savings or emergencies.
I really appreciate your blog and explanation of why to save money. I don’t think people realize how, once you get your feet on safe footing (maybe the first year after college), this should be the easiest time in your life to save. I am 27, have no kids, total control over my spending and the power of compounded interest is on my side. My fiance and I are about to get married and have set out to save $50k in cash our first year of marriage. We do have greater income than many our age, but I will be blogging about the ups and downs of actually doing it. I found that most sites focused on simple tips to save a few dollars, we are going to track our efforts and how it fits into our life plans. This is about choosing how you will live your life, not having extra beer money around for us. Check some of it out and hopefully you can watch as we try this.