Basic dietary and lifestyle improvements, especially as they relate to snacking, are drastically easier to make when you don't have a decade's worth of bad habits holding you back. I wish I'd started cutting back on pops and energy drinks and chips and chocolate at 22 instead of waiting until I was 32 years old and pre-diabetic.
Also, fucking floss. It's not bullshit, and it's not a scam to help Big Dental sell you flavoured string. It's a real thing you should actually do. Especially if you're like me, still eating like a fucking teenager into your 30s.
I got on the water flosser bandwagon a few years ago, and it has changed my life. I used to HATE flossing, simply because the string floss method takes forever (absolutely deserved if you call me out for impatience here!). I now have a water flosser, and floss just about every day.
If some of you don’t know, you may brush every day, but people can tell if you don’t floss. The in between the teeth stink is very distinct, and brushing does not get rid of it!!
While it doesn't necessarily need to be stocks, investing early will greatly reduce your financial burden later down the road if you want to save for retirement. Check out the cost of waiting: https://www.primerica.com/public/high-cost-of-waiting.html
Not the guy you asked, but: to make money. Obviously the more money you have the more you make, but 10% return is 10% return. Anyone can invest and it’s a wise financial decision that can really pay off, especially if you start while young
Individual stocks is probably a bad idea (since that’s basically gambling), but investing in something like broad-market index funds in a retirement account is better sooner rather than later. Since the stock market roughly doubles every 10yrs, your money is worth a lot more when you’re young, hence “I wish I did this in my 20s”
Compound interest. Buy into a total market index fund that will get you more or less 7% on average a year. Let’s say you have a $100 extra per month (doesn’t actually matter whatever you can afford).
Sally from age 20-30 puts her $100 in every month. At the end she has about $16000. She stops adding anything, but keeps that money invested. By 65 she has $170k.
Jeff doesn’t start investing until he’s 30, but he’s consistent and does the same thing, $100 a month from 30-65. He ends up with about $165k.
What that means is Sally made more money than Jeff even though she did the same thing for 10 years that he did for 35. She just started earlier.
I think better advice would be "invest/save" in general. You could just throw money into a mutual fund, index fund, savings account, whatever. If you get a job with an employer matched 401k, max that out. I don't think you need to worry about trying to play the stock market by buying individual stocks. You'll end up spending way too much time doing it for minimal gains over an index fund, and a lot of the time you're just basically gambling on what companies you think are going to do well.
I want to piggyback on this, if you are in your 20s now, or any age really, if you are willing to do online-only banking and have a good size monthly payday deposit some online banks like Discover and Ally will offer 4% APR savings accounts, that is unheard of at places like Bank of America that were only offering us 0.1% APR on savings accounts.
If and only if you are good with money and won't go crazy, buy everything with a decent APR rate credit card and pay it off at the end of the month. We buy gas and only gas with a credit builder card after screwing up in our 20s, it's helped tremendously and credit scores can affect everything you do from insurance rates to job offers.
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