Personal Finance Guide For Young Adults

Hello Grasshoppa,

Many years ago, when I first started working, I had no clue about financial literacy & the best part of all, I had zero knowledge on how to invest. Back then, I spent most of my money on entertainment like drinking to partying, piling up credit cards & other unnecessary debts. As a result, I was left with mountains of debts that I had to pay off the hard way. I often ask myself, if I could turn back time, what would I have done differently?

Learning about personal finance & investment the hard way has taught me a lot & that is why I am writing this blog to you. Without these hard lessons, most probably my blog will never even exist. Every single year, there will be more fresh grads that will start to step into the real world & with the amount of money they earn, how well can they manage it? Financial literacy is an extremely important subject to learn & I personally think that our education system should emphasize a lot about this. During my time from primary school up to college, this topic was taught vaguely although I wish that I was taught more on financial literacy.

As a young adult that have entered the workforce, what are some of the basic points that they need to know about managing their money? Is saving their monthly salary in their bank account good enough or are there more things that they should do to grow their money? In my years of talking to many young adults, the most common problem that they have is on financial literacy. Most of them have limited ideas on how should they manage their money. Some of them have no savings & they are living from paycheck to paycheck and spend most of their salary on unnecessary items while piling up more debts. There are also some that have savings but they have no idea on how to grow their savings through investment.

Seeing these general problems that they face; do we blame the government or education system on this or should we blame the young adults for not wanting to learn more? Personally, for me, I blame both. Being a young adult once, despite receiving limited knowledge on financial literacy from primary school to college, I could have put in an initiative to learn more on financial literacy. I chose to not learn it & it was truly my fault. With all the information that was available on the internet, books, or other media, it was not hard to learn from it. It is up to us how much effort we are willing to put to learn about it. If you are willing to spend some time to learn from it, I am very sure you can learn from it.