How Can Young People Optimize Their Time While Living at Home?

If you’re living at home with minimal expenses, you have a golden opportunity to save and invest for the future. Now’s your chance to take whatever income you have and set yourself up to succeed. However, before you start that, in order to make the most of your financial situation, the first thing you'll need is the ability to actually understand your financial situation. It won't take much. You can do this by performing an income and expense evaluation using a budget calculator. Once you've gotten a summary of your income and key expenses, you can start brainstorming how much money you can allocate towards investing and how many you can allocate towards paying down debt (if you have any). Understanding your budget is crucial to making the most of your time when living at home. If you don’t know your monthly liabilities and understand your financial situation you won’t be able to realistically plan for the future and get ahead. The two things go hand in hand.

Plan of Action

The next step is to set a plan of action, utilizing any freely available dollars to pay down high interest debt and invest for the future. If you are not paying rent to your parents, you should use any savings to either aggressively tackle student loan debt, pay down credit card debt or save for investments. Many millennials don’t take advantage of this! If you can do this, you will be that much ahead of your peers. Also, do not be afraid to take risks! If you have a business idea or a dream worth pursuing use this time to try new things. Any failures you go through at a young age will likely be great learning experiences. However, it is important that you “fail forward” in everything you do.

Lean Into Your Strengths

Depending on your strengths there are a multitude of great work from home opportunities. If you highly creative and skilled in graphic design, you can take up freelance or gig opportunities in this area. You can also sell homemade goods on Etsy, look into building a drop shipping business on Shopify, try your luck at blogging or freelance writing, look into become a social media manager, etc. The key thing here is that you are young and you should pursue your passions! Value love of work over money - If you love what you do and bring a unique flare to any of the above areas - money will usually follow.

In regards to paying down debts, you should always focus on evaluating the opportunity cost of your money! It never makes sense to have $4,000 sitting in your savings account accruing very little interest, when you have $2,000 in credit card debt that has a 20% APR. This is by far the best way to pay down your debt! Your main priority should always be to pay off “bad debt” (high interest and unsecured debt like credit card debt, student loans, unsecured personal loans, etc.).

If you take the time to use your savings and invest in things you believe in, whether that be people, products, equities, cryptocurrencies, etc., you'll be able to come out ahead for years to come and will ideally set yourself up for success in the future.