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5 Ways to Invest in Yourself in Your Twenties

4th June 2019

invest in yourself in your twenties

Invest in yourself.

What does that really mean? Is it selfish? Is there an ETF of myself I can invest in? Yes, the phrase ‘invest in yourself’ can be a bit vague, so today we’re going to break down 5 actionable ways you can invest in yourself in your twenties.

In general, ‘invest in yourself’ means making a larger effort in your younger years in order to have a better quality life in the future. This would be investing in both your personal and professional growth, giving you a greater return of yourself in the future. Kind of like an ETF 😛.

We talk a lot about this on Financially Mint; how to invest in yourself early on so you have a career of best personal fit later on, and so you make your big bucks later on. I’m doing it myself, as I pursue and test different careers to figure out what I want to commit to. Here are 5 ways you can too:

 

1. Commit time to exploration

When we finish high school everyone expects us to know what we want in life. We’re expected to have passions, to know what degree to pursue in university and the exact path to take. But then we end up in university, doing a degree we don’t value that much that will cost us money, time and energy. 🤷‍♀️

So I say, instead of heading to university, take the time to explore. This doesn’t have to mean taking a gap year and travelling the world. It basically means exploring and investigating career paths and testing. Just like a scientist, you have different hypotheses of which career you’d like to follow. And so you need to test. This can be through student internships, through Life Design interviews or simply by doing a ton of research. And the great thing about exploration is that you can also be building your own career at the same time – by doing internships which will help you build specific skills, by interviewing people who will provide valuable connections and by producing content which will build your portfolio.

And maybe you find out that you do need to go to university to continue your career. And that’s great, because then you’ll know exactly what you need.

invest in yourself in your twenties
time to explore

 

2. Focus on building skills, portfolio and connections instead of money

When we first enter the working world, we suddenly get in touch with much more money than what we were used to. And depending on your education and what kind of person you are you may be tempted to spend it or hoard it. If you discover the concept of financial independence you’ll be tempted to hoard as much as you can, so you can then retire early.

And I’m not saying that’s bad, I’m just saying that really it’s about balance. Think about it, you’ll reach the peak of your career in your 40s to 50s. To maximise this and earn more, you want to be building career capital (aka skills, portfolio and connections). If you focus just on making money when you’re young, you risk getting stuck in one field with the same specific skills.

Yes making money is important, and at FM we recommend saving and investing 15% for your retirement. But if you can use that money to build other skills or to ‘invest in yourself’ – then do that. The returns will be ten times bigger later on. 💸

 

3. Start with a financial education

Financial education is essential in order to know how to manage your money. By taking control of your money, you will have more head space to focus on what really matters: life.

So the sooner you start investing in a financial education, the more financially intelligent you’ll be in your adult years. With the money part in control, you won’t have to worry about ever ending up on the streets, losing all your money to fees or not having money for emergencies. Financially Mint’s homepage has an easy to follow guide to getting a financial education started.

The best part; by starting in your 20s you will take advantage of the huge power of compound interest. £100 per month invested starting at 25 will turn into £181,000 when you’re 60. Use that power.

Contrary to all the stuff you see on the media, investing is not complicated and it’s easy to understand. You start with a budget, then you learn how to save, then you learn how to make money and finally you learn how to invest. With that covered, you can focus on investing in yourself through your career and life.

 

4. Personal exploration and growth

Yes I realise this phrase is also pretty vague. But what I mean is that be open to grow your personal life in as many ways as possible. It’s essential to also grow in your career, but to maximise this even more you also need to learn about yourself.

To be able to invest more in yourself you’ll need to know what to invest in. You’ll need to understand who you are, what you like doing and what you’re best at. You could call this personal exploration.

It is a bit vague, and honestly it does depend on every person; every person needs different things to grow. Here are some ideas:

  • Reading the right books
  • Attending interesting conferences
  • Travelling and working abroad
  • Finding a mentor/career coach
  • Doing Life Design interviews
  • Listening to interesting podcasts
  • Taking up new hobbies every now and then
  • Doing exercise

Growing personally will allow you to grow financially and through your career. So do not ignore the wishy washy part of investing in yourself which is to ‘know thyself’.

invest in yourself in your twenties
do you really know yourself?

 

5. Build meta skills

It’s always great to know that you’ll always be able to make money. This comes naturally to those who have been in their career for longer and who have the right contacts, but how can a young 20 something do this?

There are certain skills that you can build which won’t take too long that you can use when the going gets rough or when you need to diversify your skill set. Most of these can be done on a laptop i.e. working from home, and will be very useful in the future when tech will be an even more prominent part of our lives. Here are 6 examples of meta skills:

  1. Translation
  2. Teaching
  3. Programming
  4. Digital marketing
  5. Design
  6. Writing

In my opinion, just by mastering 2 of those skills and learning how to pitch to clients, you can get a pretty good return. These are also skills that can be learnt through online courses and with practice. This investment in yourself can give you an immediate return when you’ll need it most, but also a return later on, when you may find yourself in need of these more practical skills. Never hurts to try. 

When you understand the importance of investing in yourself early on and how it can pretty much change your future life, everything you do in current life changes. You realise the huge amount of power you currently have, just by focusing on learning as much as you can now. Your twenties are special years, you’re constantly learning something new about the world and about yourself. These are the years where you can learn a lot, make a lot of mistakes and gain a lot of ground career and personality wise. So why not start now? 😎

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How Life Design Interviews Will Help Get Your ‘Dream Career’

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My name's Araminta and I'm freelance FinTech Copywriter.

I started Financially Mint to help other 20 something year olds learn about money and fix their finances early in life 💪

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  • 5 Ways to Invest in Yourself in Your Twenties
  • How Life Design Interviews Will Help Get Your ‘Dream Career’
  • How Career Building and Exploration Allowed FG to Earn a $500,000 Salary
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  • The 5 Rules to Effectively Manage People 👦

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Financially Mint is on another break! ☕ I will Financially Mint is on another break! ☕

I will be living in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for the next few months, and then hopefully heading to Australia. 
My plans for the next year:

I'm putting the career testing theory into practice. My next career test is working for an NGO here in Kuala Lumpur. This week will be my first week. I will be working with sex trafficking survivors and I've also been asked to do some financial education presentations to help the staff.

After that the plan is to move to Melbourne, Australia, and do my next career test: consulting. If that doesn't work out I will try another career test which may be more achievable: business development in a startup. Thanks to the amazing career books that I've read, I'm pretty confident I can get an interesting job. We'll see how it rolls. 🏀

How am I funding this? I'm very excited to say that I've managed to grow my part-time freelancing income to a full-time income that can sustain me in South East Asia (I would need to work full-time in Europe). I'm calling myself a 'Freelance FinTech Writer'. Rent is crazy cheap (like 300€/month) and it's literally cheaper to eat out than cook. I'm still able to save 15% of my income. 🎉🎉 The increase in clients and pay has been thanks to all the effort I put into Financially Mint, and to some crazy cold emailing and networking in the past few months. 
After some thought, I concluded that learning mark-up language (HTML + CSS) was a more efficient use of my time than writing blog posts and working on FM... so I am now taking a break to learn some basic coding and decide what to do next.

I will still be podcasting and taking part in the FI community on Twitter and everywhere else... so I'll still be seeing you around 😉

To our success 🎉🎉
Only 30% of jobs are posted online. 🙄 Let's sa Only 30% of jobs are posted online. 🙄

Let's say you've got a list of career paths to test. You've figured out a direction, you know which sector you want to work in and you've got some cool companies in mind.

But then what? How do you get an internship in the company you really want to work for? How do you get a job in that specific NGO? How do you get them to notice you? 🤔

In FM's latest post I share a strategy that I am still testing but seems to work - copied from a book titled 'Designing your Life' by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans:

The strategy: Conducting 'Life Design' Interviews. .
A Life Design Interview is basically meeting the person that has your 'dream career' for coffee. ☕

You find someone who is working at the company you want to work for, in the sector you want to work for or simply has a position you're interested in, and you reach out to them (LinkedIn helps). You ask about their story, their position, how they got to where they are and their advice to people starting out. 
This is what I've been doing for the past month in Edinburgh, and of the 40 people I contacted, I met 8 of them for coffee, my goal to simply learn about their story.

With an added bonus: Trust. ✅

Not only did I learn stuff about working in a startup, or as a content writer or working in an NGO, but I also built a trusted connection. It's those connections that help you find the hidden jobs, the dream careers and the best opportunities.

Check out FM's latest post for a proper run down on Life Design interviews. 💪 (Last week we organised the FI Europe podcast retreat! An amazing 4 days doing speeches, masterminds, debates, boat trips, beach and surfing. Post on this coming soon 🔥)
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#financiallymint #budget #budgeting #personalfinance #savinghacks #makemoney #savemoney #money #shoestringbudget #moneyhacks #moneysavinghacks #financialeducation #financialfreedom #adulting #savingtricks #earnmoney #lifeadvice #counsel #careeradvice #retirement #investing #careerbuilding #skillbuilding #career #selfimprovement #inspiring #fieurope #lifedesign #interviews
Investing in yourself now will return bucket loads Investing in yourself now will return bucket loads in the future. 🔮

I talk a lot about this on Financially Mint - how taking the time to build career capital and explore career paths will allow you to find a career of best personal fit, which will then make you the money you need.

But it is true that I am personally at the very start of this journey, and so can't offer many examples of this working. 🤷‍♀️ Well today, this changes as I interview the Financial Gladiator, who did exactly that.

He went to university to study business in Poland, and finished his masters in Australia. In the meantime, he was doing internships, making connections, building skills and beefing up his portfolio. 
He says it himself: ' I always looked to add experience and skills to my repertoire rather than dollars' 💸.
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7 internships later in several different countries and industries and a lot of hustling, moving around and learning about what career fitted him best, FG ended up in a job that paid him a six figure salary. This kept on snowballing, and in his early thirties he hit a salary of over $500,000. .
That goes to show how much investing in yourself can return in the future.
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$500,000 annual salary doesn't need to be your goal, but it still goes to show that you'll make the bulk of your money after investing in your own career. 📈

A great interview filled with actionable career advice and FG's complete story, check out FM's latest blog post! (Edinburgh castle 🔥)
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#financiallymint #budget #budgeting #personalfinance #savinghacks #makemoney #savemoney #money #studentmoney #studenthacks #studentlife #shoestringbudget #moneyhacks #moneysavinghacks #financialeducation #financialfreedom #adulting #savingtricks #earnmoney #lifeadvice #counsel #careeradvice #retirement #investing #careerbuilding #skillbuilding #career #selfimprovement #inspiring #work
Most of us don't know what we want to do in our tw Most of us don't know what we want to do in our twenties 🤷‍♀️. And that's absolutely normal.

But that's why we don't want to be committing to one thing - who know what you might want to do in 5 years? 🧐

Instead of committing, why not be exploring, investigating and testing career paths. But how can you do this cleverly without being a typical 'millennial-career-hopper'? By building career capital at the same time.

This means that every career test you do will help you build skills, connections and a more solid portfolio. If you have no idea where to start, here are some examples of jobs/activities that can help you build career capital:

1. Working for a growing organisation with a growing performance: this could be consulting, a startup - anywhere with a good mentor and team 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦
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2. Graduate studies - for those who want to work in research, a think tank, etc.
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3. Building a valuable and transferable skill - skills such as writing, programming, designing, data science, etc will always be useful in the future 💻
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4. Creating content - you don't always need a shiny piece of paper or a medal to show that you've done something. Creating your own thing can be just as useful.
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And much more amazing career advice... in FM's latest blog post 🤓
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(I’m running out of pictures to post so here’s one of a beautiful evening in Edinburgh) .
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#financiallymint #budget #budgeting #personalfinance #savinghacks #makemoney #savemoney #money #studentmoney #studenthacks #studentlife #shoestringbudget #moneyhacks #moneysavinghacks #financialeducation #financialfreedom #adulting #savingtricks #earnmoney #lifeadvice #counsel #careeradvice #retirement #investing #peoplemanagement #skillbuilding #career #selfimprovement #inspiring #work
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