 What's happening guys it's Shane here and in today's video I'm going to be going over five money mistakes that I personally made in college. Now some of these will be mistakes that just about everybody makes and you'll probably learn a lot from this. You may even recognize some of these habits in yourself but hopefully you can either not do these in the first place or if you are doing them you can recognize them in yourself and stop. I'm going to jump right into it right after you gently boop the like button for the YouTube algorithm but the first one on the list is going to be a very common one and that is eating out too much. This happens to almost everybody. You go from an environment where you're at home maybe your parents cook for you or maybe you know how to cook for yourself but it's usually pretty simple like you put stuff in the microwave and then you go from that to an environment where there's lots of options out there for you to eat a lot of restaurants on campus usually there's a lot of restaurants right off of campus as well. Your friends are inviting you to go out to eat all the time it's also really inconvenient for you to go from a class you know drive all the way back home or take the bus all the way back home just to make yourself food so you're going to end up eating out all the time. This is exactly what happened to me as well during college and it is crazy when you break down how much it actually costs how much you're spending on eating out. There was one time there was especially stressful where I started calculating how much I was spending on food and you know coffee and etc and it was over a thousand dollars a month. Now if you've been following this channel for a long time I've made videos showing you that with a thousand dollars a month you can literally invest that for a few decades and retire. So this is a significant amount of money and especially when you're young you have the power of compound interest on your side. Now I actually love food I consider myself a foodie. I have friends and we go out and try all kinds of new restaurants but I'm definitely not going out every single day to the same restaurant again and again and spending money there. This is something that you can definitely do in moderation and I think one of the best investments I ever made was buying a crock pot. Buying a crock pot you know you can just put stuff in there there's lots of recipes out there on the internet it's extremely inexpensive you throw stuff in there at the beginning of the day you come back at the end of the day and it's done or you can throw stuff in there fall asleep you know sleep for eight hours wake up in the morning and you've got an entire meal. In fact a lot more than an entire meal if you get one of the bigger crock pots sometimes it'll last you three to five days. So this is one of the easiest ways for you to save a ridiculous amount of money if you get a crock pot or you pre-make your meals or you just plan ahead a little bit so that you're not eating out all the time. The second mistake that I made is I didn't start investing early enough. People put off investing because they think that they don't have enough money or a significant amount of money that's going to actually make a difference. But the truth is even if you just start investing like $20 a month $50 a month $100 a month it's going to make a huge difference not only directly because of the fact that you have the power of compound interest on your side but I think indirectly it makes a huge psychological difference. It's almost like getting yourself to go to the gym right so if you try to make yourself go to the gym you see this every single year on January 1st people are like oh I'm going to go to the gym five times a week and then they last maybe like two or three days and then they give up but a much more effective strategy is if you want to develop a habit you start off with very small steps right so instead of going to the gym every day maybe you do 30 push-ups a day you do that for about a week or so and then maybe you start going to the gym once or twice a week and then it just becomes more and more of a habit and all of a sudden you find yourself turning into one of those weird crossfit people who can't stop talking about it just kidding but I think you get my point here but something that you can do right now is get down on the floor and do some push-ups and it's the same thing with investing even if you have a tiny amount to invest you need to start investing right away because it's going to build that habit and even more important than the money itself that you're investing it's more of like a psychological thing where you're building a habit that's going to help you out tremendously later on in life because the truth is most people don't start investing until they're in their 30s and that's why I really love a lot of these apps that they have out there these days you know you've got like acorns for instance that's an app where you know you can set it to where let's say something costs 50 cents or 75 cents it'll round that up to a dollar and invest the additional 25 cents I also have a link to Weebol down in the description I talk about that every once in a while Weebol is a super easy app to use you also get like four free stocks valued at up to $1,800 I think that's the latest one that they're offering so investing is incredibly important I think I did it relatively early you know compared to most people but I could have done it even earlier you know opening up a Roth IRA when you're 18 years old is probably one of the best decisions you could ever make the third big mistake that I made is not getting work experience early enough now I actually did get work experience as a teenager I worked for a nonprofit and I worked in various different positions but I think specifically what I'm referring to here is doing things during college that don't actually matter right so I spent I can't even tell you how many hundreds maybe even thousands of hours doing these different positions for instance I was like at one point during college I was the liaison for one organization I was the chair of like several other organizations I was the vice president of one organization I was the president of the class I had all these different positions I spent a ridiculous amount of time in those positions and I can tell you that it didn't impress anybody it would have been so much better if I just had maybe one or two positions max all throughout that time and I did something really cool in those positions something that I could talk about something that I was passionate about versus having all these different positions where I wasn't really accomplishing very much in them I was kind of just going through the motions and the reason for that is because I was just dividing my attention in way too many directions what would have been much better is if I just got work experience that's what employers actually care about that's also where you're going to learn the majority of the things that actually matter and even if you end up having a super crappy job which most people are going to have at least one crappy job throughout their lifetime the way you can think about it is it's going to make you appreciate the good jobs that you have in the future even more so yeah work experience is super super important I think that anybody honestly even if you're in high school you should try to get some work experience but definitely if you're in college get yourself a part-time job I cannot emphasize enough how important that is at this point in my life I've trained so many new hires and the difference is night and day between the people who had work experience versus the people who didn't have any even if the work experience they had was completely unrelated to the actual job they're doing just the fact that they have that work experience they have that basic level of professionalism they know how to use a phone they know how to use a fax machine it just makes a huge difference I know this uh recruiters know this hiring managers know this bosses know this it's just a fact the fourth mistake that I made is something that I see a lot of people making this is probably the most common thing and that is this thing called lifestyle creep now I grew up kind of poor and I learned to basically just live off of a tiny amount of money I really didn't need very much in order to survive but as I went to college I was kind of a round a bunch of people from different you know socioeconomic backgrounds some people were really well off some people were not that well off but I saw other people oh they had a really nice laptop for instance and so I'm like you know what I have this scholarship or I have these student loans maybe I'll get myself a really nice laptop and I saw oh other people have the newest iPhone and so what did I do I went out and I got the newest iPhone and that's what lifestyle creep is all about basically the higher up you get the more money you start making or the more money that you have available to you the more you start spending and this can get absolutely ridiculous to the point where you're making millions of dollars a year but you're not actually able to save and invest that money because you're out there buying Lamborghinis and yachts and lifestyle creep is the reason that 80% of lottery winners end up filing bankruptcy and 70% of professional athletes after they retire also end up filing bankruptcy lottery winners are people who won tens of millions sometimes even hundreds of millions of dollars professional athletes usually earn tens of millions of dollars throughout their career right so if you don't understand lifestyle creep and you don't get it under control it doesn't matter how much money you make you're just going to end up spending it in the game of money it's almost like you have to learn how to play offense which is making money but you also want to learn how to play defense which is saving and investing your money and you can do that by budgeting but that kind of rolls into the last mistake that I want to talk about which is I think I focused way too much on these small things and not enough on big things so when it comes to budgeting I think this is a really good thing that everybody should do at some point during their lifetime basically you want to just keep track of every single cent that you spend and there was a point in my life where I got very serious about budgeting and I truly was tracking like every cent that I spent but I realized it's not that big of a deal if I buy like a coffee from Starbucks like once a week this is not something that I need to stress about it really isn't that big of a deal at all especially if it's something that I truly enjoy it's also not that big of a deal for me to go out with my friends a few times a week and get a nice dinner and this is actually a psychological phenomena where people will freak out about like 20 off on a ten dollar item right like they'll freak out about oh my gosh I need to have 20 off on this ten dollar item so I can save two dollars like people might even not purchase the product if it's not 20 off so if you have like a 20 off coupon you bring it to the store for some reason it doesn't work anymore you might decide to not buy the product and you're doing all that just to save two dollars but when it comes to buying a car you think you want to get it for you know 19 or 18 thousand dollars but the salesman won't budge and you end up spending 20,000 but they don't think it's that big of a deal if they want to buy a car for 19 thousand dollars but the salesman ends up selling it to them for 20,000 so in one of those cases you would have saved a thousand dollars which is a significant amount of money in the other case it's only two dollars but people don't understand just because of the fact that it's relative it's not worth it for you to obsess over these small little things here and there the two dollars here and there not only from a money perspective but also from a time and energy perspective so the way I track my money now is I basically just use automated apps like personal capital that keeps track of my money and keeps track of my spending and if something looks like it's a little bit out of line I'll kind of cut back on it a little bit but I'm not tracking every single penny anymore I used to do that and I think it's a great phase for everyone to go through but at the end of the day you probably want to focus more on making money than tracking every penny if you're spending like five to ten hours every single week budgeting imagine if you just worked five to ten extra hours per week and see how much more money you would make all right so that's all I have for you in this video hope you enjoyed it check out my other videos right here I made them just for you go ahead hit that like button hit the subscribe button ring the notification bell and comment down below any thoughts comments criticisms etc that you have on the video and I will see you next time