The typical young Australian generally treats their life like a playground for adults when finishing high school. The ensuing few years are filled with travel, going out, spending too much money at the bar, cafés and generally just enjoying their new found relative, independence and wealth.

This is indeed how I spent those years.

The conventional wisdom is that you won’t get a chance to do these things later in life. By that time you will have a real career, a family and a mortgage to worry about. Therefore you should take advantage of the time and freedom you have now to live it up.

This is another one of those pieces of advice that I look back on and I think is just ridiculous.

To worsen the situation, it is completely self fulfilling. It’s true that you wont have time in the future, but that’s because you are spending all your wealth and free time right now!

I have heard beauts such as these on more than one occasion:

‘Don’t waste your youth’ and ‘You’re only young once’

This sounds perfectly reasonable on first brush, hell I can even find myself agreeing with it in some sense. This is however just a thinly disguised equivalent to the “I don’t want to miss out“ excuse. But let’s break it down to what they are actually saying, translated by Pat the Shuffler:

‘By not spending big now, you risk wasting your most energetic and enthusiastic years merely trying to amass wealth’

But I as Pat the Shuffler can change these words to mean something completely different and throw it right back in their court.

‘By not earning and saving now, you are wasting years or even decades of compounding and effectively stealing freedom from your future self for luxuries right now’

These comments make the assumption that earning money, saving and investing as much as possible is a waste of your youth. That spending money is a life worth lived, and saving money is a life wasted. But we already know that isn’t true, because we have discovered the real ways to make yourself happy. So my argument is I can simultaneously live a full and happy life right now and still save a mountain of money in the process.

As far as I can ascertain, this is actually the best use of your youth.

The conventional wisdom is absolutely backwards.

You can either:

Work like a possessed human now while you are your sharpest, quickest thinking and most energetic. Then relax more in life a little later when slowing down and when you have the responsibilities associated with parenting.

or

Take it easy and spend big now while you are your sharpest. Saving all the hard work for later when you are slowing down, become more easily tired and have mounting responsibilities.

Choosing option 1 has the added bonus that it gives most time in the market for compounding investments, so it reduces the total time you need to spend working for an income throughout your lifetime.

You know what I regret now about my previous self? If I could change one thing it would be :

Going to the city and blowing $100 or even $200 in one night. Done weekly for longer than I care to admit.

I still could have had plenty of fun going out to the city with friends. If i just restricted my drinking expenditure, I would have come out of those years tens of thousands of dollars ahead.

All that lost wealth, done for so long and with nothing to show for it.

If I have a message for younger Australians it would be this.

Life is more than just your 20s

After your 20s you will have another 50 possibly 60 years or more to consider. Despite what you may think right now, being 30 is actually still not all that old.

I am almost 30 and still have a lot of energy, a lot of ‘youth’, the opportunity to be in peak physical shape and to travel. If one takes care of their health they can maintain a great deal of energy for decades. If however they are working for decades, they have to juggle work, children, health and being social, this makes it a whole lot more complicated and concessions are made every single day. I believe that it is the constant strain of modern daily life repeated for decades that is a part of why older people feel like they don’t have a huge amount of energy.

Focusing on your happiness over your entire lifetime instead of only your ‘here and now’ can be hard when you are young. This is a consequence of never having lived in the real world where you have no choice but to rely upon and provide for yourself. Life can be a seemingly never-ending grind. There is nothing like years or decades in that grind to teach you how important building wealth early on is.

Before the naysayers come galloping my way, I am not suggesting young people live like hermits. A great time can still be had focusing on time with friends, drinking and eating at BBQs and mate’s places instead of at bars, clubs and restaurants.

Traveling ‘cheap’ close to home instead of the most expensive places on the planet can also be done in the meantime, saving those huge life changing travel experiences until a few years later when a significant amount of wealth has been accumulated.

As we now know, it actually is possible to work and save, retire early and have time to do all the things you want to with your life. We have real life examples of people doing just this, such as Mr Money Mustache.

If you amass wealth during your youth and spend intelligently, utilising your parent’s generosity (instead of throwing it away) in giving you a roof, food and paid bills, your living costs can be virtually nothing. A huge proportion of your income can then be invested.

Done this way the magic of time and compounding can have the largest effect.

This is of course the winning strategy if you don’t want to miss out. You will miss out on far less as an overall proportion of your life by putting more money away now.

When young, we often do not appreciate how short our time really is. We just haven’t lived enough to understand that 10 years can fly by in a flash. So contrary to what all the slaves of modern life are telling you, I suggest an opposing opinion.

Work like you are possessed.

Take advantage of your parent’s generosity, that is why they give it to you, so you can get ahead in life.

Save every penny.

Invest all your savings.

Then after what you think is a long time, but is actually a very real and short period of time, when you have reached the ripe old age of 30 and your peers are complaining about how hard it is to buy a house, you can put your feet up and chillax for as long as you like.

I would love to hear from some older people on the path to or who have already attained FI about their opinions on this post. The conventional wisdom of spending big in your youth is just so prevalent!

Performing the Life Long Shuffle.

Pat the Shuffler

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