8 Unexpected Things I Learned About Money in my 20’s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6s1dYMgwbw I live what you would call an unconventional decade in my 20's. Married young, kids young, poor to career success to starting a business and achieving financial freedom at 28. Here's some of the unexpected things I learned about money during my 20's. 8 Unexpected Things I Learned From My 20's 1: Financial Freedom Doesn't Made You Happy 2: Being Poor Definitely Makes You Unhappy 3: Debt Will Eat You Alive 4: Budgeting Is a Skill You Can Learn 5: Focus on Building Your Skills 6: Paying Yourself First is SO Important (and so easy) 7: Happiness is More Important Than Money 8: STOP Trying To Get Rich Quick Recommended Videos: What Financial Freedom Feels Like Our Best and Worst Financial Decisions How I Manage My Bank Accounts and Budget Transcription: I lived what you might call an unconventional decade in my 20s I didn't live a life that most 20 year olds were to live but through that journey I learned a lot about money and in today's episode I want to share some of the unexpected things that I learn about money through my unconventional 20s hi i'm ryan from on-property don't comdata you helping you achieve financial freedom and welcome to the money shed where today we're going to be talking about these lessons that I learned now as I said at the start I didn't live at conventional 20s or maybe that's conventional for someone in the 50s or something like that I actually got married at the age of 20 I had my first child at 22 my second child at 23 so I didn't go to university or anything so we were quite poor at 23 and I had myself and three other people that I was fully responsible for fully financially responsible for for feeding for housing all of that sort of stuff so we weren't very well-off I then did the career path ended up in a career where I was earning six figures had a free car free petrol a really good career and then left all that to start my own business build up my own business had my third child at 27 and was financially free through my business at 28 lived in a van lived in multiple different cities so didn't really do what a standard 20 year old might do which is go to uni party travel a bit and then start building up your career yeah I started young and I kind of did my 20s really differently and so here are some unexpected things that I learned through that decade of my life that I think may help you whether you decide to live a more conventional 20s and you know I probably wouldn't advise people to do what I did but I don't regret it either but these things might help you on your journey so the first thing and I think this is actually the biggest thing that I want to get across and that was discovering that financial freedom doesn't make you happy so that age of 28 I achieved what I call pseudo financial freedom so online businesses that were generating me enough money that I didn't have to work so I had a couple of years there where I didn't have to work at all I just we spent it up in noose our I went to the beach every day drank coffee every day and just kind of worked on the side and dabbled in work a little bit here and there but I didn't need to work I call it pseudo financial freedom because I knew it wasn't the long-term financial freedom that property investing or investing in shares can give you and it was going to be a short-term thing but I got to experience what financial freedom was like for a couple of years there at the end of my 20s and I learned pretty quickly that financial freedom does not make you happy so I thought it was just going to be get you chief financial freedom or you get rich and then BAM click your fingers you are going to be the happiest person on earth you can do whatever you want with your time whatever you want with your life and while there was an element to that what I actually found out what my experience actually was was that I didn't have any purpose in my life and I didn't know what to do with my life or what to do with my time because previously I was just working so hard to get to this goal of financial freedom and my identity and all of my time was put into that to then take that away from me I was like I don't know what to do with this and so I learnt that financial freedom doesn't make you happy I went into a deep dark depression one of my worst depressions ever in my life and I've you know struggled with that stuff on and off throughout my life but that was really bad and it took me probably 18 months to kind of find my footing and to work out okay what is it that actually makes me happy in this life now that I don't really have to work so while financial freedom doesn't make you happy it does give you the freedom to explore your happiness and to try and find it and so I tried multiple different things I was playing out doing a lot of video games and trying to get good at that I was looking to run an ultra marathon I just tried so many different things in my life and so having the freedom to try those things was great and financial freedom buy you that which is really good but you start to go out there and find your happiness financial freedom doesn't create happiness for you the second thing that I learned is that being poor definitely makes you unhappy we spent many years I guess a couple of years there where we had young children and we were really not well-off at all and we were really just scraping by and we had so many fights in our relationship and so many troubles just because of our lack of income and lack of money that we had so while when you're being us when you're a single person you can get by on a lot less and it doesn't matter as much but when you've got a child to feed or multiple children to feed as well as other people that you're responsible for then not having money definitely makes you unhappy so while financial freedom doesn't create happiness not having money I definitely experienced that that makes you unhappy what you want to do with that is completely up to you the third thing that I learned is that debt will eat you alive so we started our marriage at 20 heavily in debt so credit card debt travel debt car loan debt as well and as I said we weren't very well off at that time either neither of us went to university wouldn't have skills to earn a good wage I was trying to make money online and just working part-time so it wasn't only good money anyway and those debt repayments were just eating us alive and eating the little money that we did have so when we finally got out of debt I made sure that we wouldn't get into bad debt again so when it came to car loans when it came to getting loans to buy technology or things like that the answer was just know if we can pay cash for it sure but if we can't then we're just going to make do with what we have and so that meant buying cars that were just a few thousand dollars and paying those in cash and not being really happy with those cars but they got us from A to B and they were okay and meant going without a lot of things but not being in debt meant that when it was time to I wanted to leave my pharmaceutical rep role leave the high-paying career and go out on my own I could do that because we didn't actually have anything pulling us down in terms of debt repayments that we needed to make so that just gave us so much flexibility in life to pursue our happiness the fourth thing that I learned and this learn late in my 20s and I wish I learnt it earlier is that budgeting is a skill that you can learn I always thought of budgeting is something that you're either good at or you're not and I just wasn't very good at it it didn't really make sense to me I couldn't really follow our budget I would do it for a bit then I'd get over it and then I would just leave it be what I learned towards the end of my 20s is that there's multiple different ways to budget and you need to find a budget that suits you I'll link out to a video below where I talk about the budget that I finally found that suits me and what budgets I went through to get there so you can go ahead and check that out but I learned that budgeting is not something you're good at or not it's something that you can learn and develop over time and you actually have to invest time effort energy and learning into it in order to get good at budgeting but once you do get good at it it actually becomes quite easy and that gives you the financial foundation that you need to set yourself up for success so budgeting is a skill there's very different ways to budget that suit different people so you need to find the budget that suits you and then you need to practice it but know that as you practice you're going to get better at that over time and it becomes easier the next thing is that I would say focus on building your skills so I guess I always thought that finances and life are just going to kind of go on this upward trajectory and the reality of life is that you may have years where you're on this upward trajectory and everything is going well but then you have years where things just crash and burn or you have things that change whether it be relationship changes like I had or whether it be health issues that come up or maybe you get fired from your job or get made redundant or you just get burnt out so you can't do that anymore life kind of goes through these ups and downs and what I found really important was that your finances are going to go through those ups and downs your careers going to go through those ups and downs but actually focusing on building your skills in your 20s so that you have a more diverse skill set that you have multiple different ways of making money that means if one thing goes pear-shaped then you've got all of these skills that you can either go and apply to a career and offer it to someone else's business or like me you've got all these skills that you can then use to make money in your own business a...