Young families are often faced with financial challenges when starting their journeys through life. These can be turbulent times as many are settling into their careers by getting jobs that pay decent money and figuring out what to do with it. Many young families are torn with the balance of digging out of student loan and other debt while feeling the pressure of living it up or keeping up with the Joneses. The thought of building generational wealth is so far-fetched that it’s hard to know where to even begin.

Then, for families who have young children, all kinds of other pressure, especially financially, comes into play. All at the same time, the most critical time to start building wealth is when you’re young since you have the power of compounding interest on your side.

How do we balance it all?

Living with intentionality is key. But let’s also be honest, so is having a good income. Often personal finance bloggers suggest cutting on the expense side instead of increasing on the income side. It’s easier to suggest eliminating cable or cutting out $5 coffee than finding a new job or building a side hustle. Both sides of the equation are important, but you can make a lot more money mistakes with a higher income.

Regardless of your income level the guide below can help you set up a pathway to building generational wealth. It’s in some ways very over-simplistic as each step has additional layers. With that being said, the concepts around personal finance are simple. It’s the doing that is hard.

I believe one of the greatest gifts you can give your children and your children’s children is a strong financial foundation that’s free from financial struggles. There’s a balance here too as well as we don’t want to raise spoiled kids.

After sharing a bit about my young family’s story below, there are two sections that provide thoughts on how to get started building wealth as a young family. The first section includes three important pillars that should be considered when starting out. The second section provides a few actionable tips to get your financial life in order.

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My Family’s Story

I’m embarrassed to say that I knew very little about personal finance in my 20s. This is particularly embarrassing as I went to college to study economics and finance.

Up until the age of 25, I primarily worked in food service as a server, bartender, and caterer while attending school. At age 23, I lived on my own without support from my parents while attending grad school. The money wasn’t bad but I never made more than $25k per year.

At the age of 25, I got my first job in my area of study making $50k per year. Finally – real money! Now, it was time to live life.

During my late 20s, the debt continued to pile up. A wedding, house, vacations, and student loans always had us burning through savings and taking on more debt. By age 30, my wife and I had accumulated about $100,000 in mortgage debt, $50,000 in student loans, and $25,000 in other miscellaneous debt such as car payments.

When I read about individuals in their 20s frustrated about not making financial progress, I can totally relate. However, if you’re reading a blog like this before the age of 30, chances are you will be more successful financially by the time you reach my age (37).

If you plan to start a family someday, having your financial act in order is critical. Engagement rings, weddings, children, insurance, mortgages, and on and on can be really expensive if left unchecked. Did I mention that children are expensive?

The statistics show that while financial literacy is improving, there’s still a long way to go.

Money continues to be a top reason for fights in a relationship and one of the leading reasons for divorce.

Being on the same page as your partner is so important and it’s frustrating to me that it’s not discussed more often in the mainstream. Don’t put yourself in a position to damage the state of your marriage or family by not being financially responsible.

How Do You Build Generational Wealth?

Reflecting on my family’s story, we’ve made a lot of mistakes. In our late 20s, we thought we were doing everything right, but in hindsight there was a lot we were doing wrong. Being able to rebound at age 30 was tough, but not as tough as it could have been. Despite our challenges, we also did a few things right.

Below are three of the things we did right that helped us dig out of debt and continue building our investments in our 30s. Some may seem like common sense, but I believe they are critical to build a foundation to eventually build your family’s generational wealth. By making sound financial decisions early, you can set your financial foundation for a lifetime of success.

Minimize Lifestyle Inflation

Even though we were financially a mess heading into our 30s, one thing we did right was keep our lifestyle reasonable.

We owned a home, but weren’t house poor.

We had car payments but didn’t go out and purchase new cars every few years.

And even though we had about $50,000 in student loans, we weren’t saddled with high interest credit card debt.

I’m not sure if this would have been the same if we didn’t wake up before our mid-30s. Now that we are in our late 30s, the pressure of keeping up with the Joneses is real. I struggle with it often. Without a financial plan it would be challenging not to give in.

Thankfully, when we had our “ah ha” moment it wasn’t too late to turn things around. While it’s never too late to turn your life around financially, the further down the path of debt and lifestyle inflation you get, the longer it will take to dig out.

Becoming financially literate early will allow you to minimize the temptation of lifestyle inflation until you can afford the life you want without financing it.

Realize the Benefits of Investing Early

One of my earlier posts provides the benefits of compound interest through the story of Bill and Susan.

To summarize the blog post, investing $5,000 beginning at age 25 for 10 years would leave you with more money at age 65 compared to a 35 year old who invests $5,000 for 30 years.

Too often I hear young professionals say they will worry about saving for retirement later in life. This can be a catastrophic mistake.

Not only are you potentially leaving free money on the table through an employer company match, you cannot get time back on your side to fully take advantage of compounding interest. The earlier you can start investing, the better.

If you have a young family, knowing that you have started investing early will provide more flexibility later in life if you lose a job, take a pay cut, or something worse.

Find a way to get started with investing as early as possible, even if it’s only $25 a month. Become dedicated to creating a gap between your income and spending. Grow that gap by looking for ways to increase your income and reduce expenses. At minimum, you should try to work your way to invest up to any matching provided by your company.

Set Your Financial Foundation

Becoming mindful about money early in life will give you the opportunity to set your financial foundation. Having a strong foundation will provide more flexibility as you grow your young family. Your financial foundation can be made of retirement savings, low expenses, a livable wage, passive income, or debt-free assets.

Having a strong financial foundation has allowed us to go from two incomes to one so my wife can stay at home with our young children. This wouldn’t have been possible without a strong financial foundation.

While moving to one income may not be the desired outcome for your family, something will come up later in life where you’ll need financial flexibility. It could be a job loss, divorce, sick family member, car accident, or an aging parent. Make sure you start getting your financial ducks in a row as soon as possible.

A Step-by-Step Process to Start Building Generational Wealth

Financial information can be overwhelming. If you are like many families and living paycheck-to-paycheck, below are a few actionable steps that you can take to start setting your financial foundation. Keep in mind, none of this is easy even though it seems simple on paper. With that being said, if you make a commitment to improving your financial life you will make progress. Not all of us will be able to build generational wealth during our lifetime, but even if we don’t quite get to the finish line, following these steps will significantly improve your financial life.

1) Track Your Expenses

We all have to start somewhere. To make changes in your financial life you first need to have a good understanding of where your money is going. Tracking your expenses for a couple months so you know where your money is going is a critical first step.

The good news is there are plenty of apps that will help you with tracking your expenses. We use Mint to track our expenses. After downloading the app it only took a few minutes to get all of our accounts linked. J.D. Roth at Get Rich Slowly has a nice tutorial on getting set up with Mint. There are dozens of other apps out there that will also allow you to track your spending.

Make a commitment to track every penny you spend for two months and see what happens. This is simple, yet hard to do. Regardless, the results can be powerful.

If your income is low and expenses are high, you may not have an opportunity to save much or pay off debt initially. However, tracking your expenses will allow you to take control of your financial situation. It will help you develop a plan. You will think twice about those impulse purchases that we all make at times.

2) Establish an Emergency Fund

Personal finance is much more behavioral than technical. One of the most frustrating aspects of trying to get your financial life in order is the surprises that come up along the way. Nothing will derail and demotivate you more than your HVAC unit going out or an unexpected medical expense. We recently had to spend $11,000 to waterproof our basement after we were hit with flooding this spring.

Your goal should be to save three-to-six months of emergency savings. You can put this money in a high interest checking or savings account, or invest it in a money market account through a brokerage account.

If you have lots of high interest debt, start by saving an emergency fund of $1,000. This will give you some cushion when small emergencies happen, such as a flat tire, broken dishwasher, or unexpected doctor’s visit. Now that you’re tracking your expenses, hopefully you’re able to find a hundred dollars or more to start building this cushion. This is so important early on as there is nothing more frustrating than having to go further into debt to cover unexpected expenses.

3) Automate Your Finances

This one is a bit more complex, but after tracking your spending for a few months and building a small emergency fund, look into automating your finances.

What is “automating your finances”? It simply means setting up systems to automatically invest, save, pay down debt, or pay your monthly bills.

All of our savings and charitable donations are set up automatically. If you have a retirement account through your workplace, such as a 401(k), you can usually set up automatic contributions. Then, when my paycheck hits our checking account, within two days any charitable donations are made automatically along with most of our bills being paid. From there we only have to worry about other regular expenses such as groceries and gasoline.

If you’re just starting out, this is where a detailed budget would be helpful. Once you create some space between income and expenses, a detailed budget may not be required if you automate your finances. We haven’t had a budget for years since we invest, give, and pay bills, leaving the rest to us to spend on whatever.

Additionally, below are a few posts from other bloggers that provide solid advice in this area:

4) Pay Off Your Debt

Now that you’ve been tracking your expenses, have a plan to build a small emergency fund, and have taken steps to automate your finances, it’s time to get laser focused on paying down debt. In this capacity, we will focus on all debt excluding your mortgage.

Take an evening to find out all of your outstanding debt and write it down. There are a few different approaches you can take to pay down your debt.

Debt Snowball Method

This involves paying down your lowest dollar debt first. The money you were using to pay the first debt would be used for the second debt. The idea is that small wins will keep you motivated to pay down the higher dollar debt.

Debt Avalanche Method

This involves paying down your debt with the highest interest rate first. Then you move to the second highest interest rate and so on. This method makes more sense from a mathematical perspective, though it could be tougher to stay motivated.

My preferred method is the debt snowball UNLESS you have high interest debt of 8 percent or more. You should pay off your credit cards first with those higher interest rates. Like many, we started our debt-free journey by following Dave Ramsey. There are Financial Peace University classes all across the United States, which is a great place to get started.

5) Invest to Build Generational Wealth

If you want to build generational wealth for your family, you have to invest your money in assets. When considering investments, you usually have three options:

Stocks, bonds, or other securities Real Estate Small Business

For the purpose of this post, we are going to primarily focus on number 1 as that is the easiest way to invest in assets. By investing 15 percent in a retirement account, you can save for a comfortable retirement if you start early. The power of compound interest is incredible. Putting aside a little today can result in huge gains in the future.

If your company offers a match with your 401(k) or other tax advantaged account, you should always try to contribute up to the match. Don’t wait to pay off all your debt or build six months of savings as you could miss out on free money from your company.

I repeat, always do what you can to invest up to your company match.

For other investments, you should pay off all of your non-mortgage debt and build an emergency fund of at least 6 months before investing above a company match or consider other investment options.

My family’s goal is to build up enough money in investments to live off the interest and allow the principle to carry over to future generations. This is how you build generational wealth. I know this is easier said than done, but once you remove debt from your life and build a financial cushion you will have room to invest in most markets, even on an average salary.

Improve Your Financial Life and Build Generational Wealth

The journey of a thousand miles starts with one step. When we started to get our financial life in order about seven years ago, it was difficult to know where to start. This was at a time when I was still early in my professional career and my wife was back in school funded by student loans.

We barely had any gap between income and expenses and in fact, the gap was probably negative as we were accruing thousands of dollars in student loans. Limiting lifestyle inflation, investing early, and setting a financial foundation will allow your family to get off to a great start financially.

Not sure where to begin?

Start small by simply tracking your expenses and building a small emergency fund. Once you’ve done this for a few months, look into options to automate your finances, develop a plan to pay off debt, and check into your employer to determine matching options. Once you free yourself from the shackles of debt, you can consider other options to buy investments that will help your family build generational wealth.

Like most personal finance related topics, the concepts are easy, but the doing is hard. Paying down debt can be a long and grueling process. It took us seven years to become completely debt free including our mortgage. I don’t want to sell this as something that will come easy. Take the first small step to get started. You’ll be surprised how much you can accomplish over the next several years.