Living at Home as a Young Professional

You may choose to live at home at some point as a young professional; people often do this so that they can pay off college loans and/or save some money.  The number of young professionals choosing to live at home after college graduation has been consistently on the rise.  Moving back home to save money may sound like a responsible thing to do, but it also comes with some potential pitfalls, which include:

•    Initially vowing that you will save money and pay down loans only to spend more because you begin to think that what you’re saving on rent is disposable income.
•    Not growing up nearly as fast as you would if you were on your own since you don’t have the same level of responsibilities.
•    Having some difficulty dating due to the potential awkwardness of spending time with a significant other in your parents’ home.
•    Becoming too complacent by having someone else fulfill the majority of your domestic responsibilities.

If you are going to live at home for any length of time after graduation, make sure you have a specific purpose for doing so, such as saving up for the down payment of a home or paying off a substantial amount of student debt.  Set a very specific goal for yourself, such as “I will live here for 18 months, and by that time I will have enough money saved up for the down payment of a home.  I need to save $500 per month over these next 24 months.”  Measure yourself monthly towards this goal and make sure the time period doesn’t get stretched out to 48 months!

Another potential pitfall to avoid is that you do not become too reliant on your parents for chores that you should be capable of doing yourself.  There is no reason why you shouldn’t be managing your own finances, doing your laundry, making your bed, ironing your clothes and paying for your share of household items.  Becoming too dependent on your parents will make it even harder to eventually go off on your own, and nobody wants to be “that person” just starting to become independent in their late 20s.

Unless you are facing uncontrollable circumstances (such as extreme amounts of debt, ill parents, family members going through some very difficult times) or unless you have a specific purpose with a specific time limit (such as saving for a down payment or paying down student debt), try to avoid living at home.  The only way you are going to become completely independent is to…. be completely independent!

Young Professional Success Tip – Start a Business

Let me make something clear; this doesn’t mean that you need to write up a 50 page business plan, raise $100,000 of capital and try to invent the “next big thing.”  This simply means that as a young professional you should offer a product and service to other people.  Determine what you are passionate about and offer it in the form of a product or service.  This doesn’t need to be your primary source of income and you may even offer it for free initially.  Figure out something you are good at or enjoy doing and find a way to offer it to others.  By doing this, you are building something you enjoy, and it won’t even feel like work at all.  Imagine if one day you could make enough doing this thing you love, that you wouldn’t need to do anything else.  So many people across the country have become “accidental entrepreneurs,” meaning that they started to do something they loved to help others and began getting paid to do it. The next thing they knew they were making enough to pay their bills and decided to do it full time.  The bottom line is that you will never know until you try, so give it a shot!

Young Professional Success Tip – Travel as Much as Possible

There may never be an easier time in your life to travel than right now while you are young – take advantage of this and start seeing the world!  Traveling to new places a lot of great advantages, such as getting to:

- See new places
- Meet new and interesting people
- Leave your comfort zone
- See the world
- Experience new things
- Learn more about yourself
- Find a better place to live
- Visit Your Friends
- Re-Energize yourself
- Have fun!

There are many others as well, but you get the idea.  Take advantage of this opportunity, because it will probably become much more difficult to do as you become older and start a family.  Make it a goal to take a road trip at least once every 3 months and go somewhere you have never been before.  Do that for 5 straight years and you’ll get to see at least 20 great new places that you have never seen before.  By doing this, you will have many more experiences than most others your age.  Travel, travel, travel!

Young Professional Success Tip – Have a Vision of Success

A vision of success is simply a clear idea of where you want to be in the future.  You must be able to close your eyes and picture what success looks like and feels like to you.  Some of the many things that could be included in your vision:

- Family you build
- People in your life
- House you live in
- Cars in your driveway
- Relationship with your faith
- City you live in
- Vacations that you go on
- Career that you build
- Business that you start
- Organizations you are involved with

98% of people in this country do not have goals for their future.  That’s right, if you walk up to 100 people at a mall or in a restaurant, 98 of them would have no clue what they want their futures to look like!  If you wake up every day without a vision of your future success and the goals you want to accomplish, it will be very difficult to accomplish a whole lot!  

It isn’t difficult; you just need to determine where you want to be and then align your decision making with it.  For instance, if you want to become a business owner then you’d better be investing in books on business leadership, surrounding yourself with entrepreneurs, building a business plan and doing the other activities necessary to begin building a successful business.  You can’t just say you want to do something – you must begin executing your vision immediately!

Your vision may change over the years, but it is important that you are working towards something, not just getting up, going to work and trying to survive.  Have a huge vision, know what your success will look and feel like and then start taking the steps necessary to reach your vision!

Young Professional Success Tip – Choose The Right Place to Launch Your Life and Career

As a young professional you typically have less holding you back than you will later on in life when it comes to choosing where you want to launch your life and career.  This provides you with an incredible opportunity to choose the perfect place for YOU.  The factors you must consider when choosing where to live as a young professional:

People – Do you want to be as close to your family as possible?  Did you make a pact with your high school friends that you would all move back home after college?  Are you and some college friends all moving to a certain city together?  Is your boyfriend/girlfriend already living somewhere?

Money – Are you at a point financially where you feel as though your only option is to move back home?  Do you want to move to a big city but can’t afford to even split a studio with your income?  Are you being offered twice as much money to start your career in a certain city?

Location – Do you need to be near a beach?  Or can you not live without the lights and sounds of a big city?  Do you need to be on the mountains and ski as much as possible?

Education – Does a school 1,500 miles away have the best program in the country?  Is your field of study only offered in certain parts of the country?

Industry – Is it easier to become an actor in Los Angeles than it is in Omaha?  How difficult is it to be a ski instructor in Miami?  Are you at an advantage to choose one location over another based on your industry?

With those factors in mind, you will need to choose if you want to live at home, live on your own in a familiar city or relocate to a completely different city.  The best advice I can give is to consider your options extensively, and don’t make a quick decision based on one of the five factors.  Weigh them all and remember that you are only young once – being a young professional may very well be your best chance to try something new and relocate to an exciting new place!

Young Professional Success Tip – Take Exceptional Care of Yourself

While you are working to strike the perfect balance between your life and career, you cannot forget the importance of taking care of your body.  If you overextend yourself and don’t take proper care of yourself, you will become less productive and more stressed, regardless of how hard you work.  Some simple and effective rules to follow:

• Eat healthy foods, avoid lots of carbohydrates and sugars (do some research if you need to)
• Work out regularly, at least 3-5 times per week (again, do some research on the proper amount of physical activity)
• Eat consistent meals throughout the day (don’t skip on meal and eat a huge one to compensate, or vice versa)

The best things you can do are find information on eating healthy, work out and take care of your body.  Find out how often you should work out, how to create a balanced diet, how many hours per night you should sleep, and learn other great practices for living a healthy lifestyle.  Believe it or not, you can either increase or decrease your chances for success significantly based on how you treat your body.  Abusing yourself and running yourself into the ground could crush your chances of reaching your vision of success, while taking exceptional care of yourself can definitely give you the energy and boost you need to get where you want to be more quickly!

Young Professional Success Tip – Embrace Failure

I LOVE to fail!  OK, that isn’t entirely true….  but I do like the learning opportunities that failures provide.  As an ambitious young professional, you are going to fail, make bad decisions, do the wrong thing and be stupid plenty of times.  The important thing that will determine if/when you reach your vision of success is how you deal with these events.  You must know how to embrace failure and learn how to turn every negative thing that happens to you into a positive.  Being able to do this will significantly speed up your learning curve and make you a better person and professional.

The only way a failure is ever really a failure is if you don’t learn from it.  Once you learn from it, you are a smarter, more experienced person who will never make that mistake again.  That is how you make failure a good thing, not a bad thing!  Those who put their heads down and react negatively to failures will end up making the same mistakes again and again in the future until they end up learning from them.

Let failure be a learning lesson that takes you one step closer to reaching your vision of success!

Young Professional Success Tip – Have Balance

Balancing your life and career sounds easy, but will more than likely be difficult for you if you have set big goals for yourself.  You will be focused on building your career, learning as much as possible, having a social life, spending time with family and all of the other things that are important to you.  A few of the many things that will be pulling you in different directions:

• Career
• Family
• Social Life
• Faith
• Community Involvement
• Volunteer Work
• Plus sleeping and eating!

Chances are good that you have a strong desire to be successful at everything you are involved with, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this.  So how do you balance all of these items and spend the appropriate time on each?  Here are a few suggestions you can easily do right now:

• Prioritize what is most important to YOU
• Develop a manageable routine that allows you to do it all without being stretched too thin
• Build in time each week to relax your body and mind
• Give yourself time during the year to rest and recharge the batteries – weekend road trips with minimal sleep don’t count!
• Don’t be scared to turn your work email off on the PDA during nights and weekends

Everyone is going to want a piece of you and of your most valuable asset:  your time.  Co-workers, charitable organizations, kids, friends, family, a significant other, people you are mentoring and many others will all want to be around you.  You must give each of those parties the time they need and deserve, but not anything above or below that.  You simply cannot give the same amount of time, or access, to each person.  Know what amount of time you need to spend with certain people and doing certain things, then build a balanced calendar that allows you to appropriately balance it all.  This won’t be easy and is a constant work in progress – the important thing is that you do your best and focus on having balance.

Young Professional Success Tip – Understand Wealth and Control Your Finances

Now more than ever, it is critical for you to understand what true wealth is and have control of your finances.  Most young professionals have no financial plan or strategy, which ends up costing them significantly in the future.  Our current national savings rate is negative, which means that the average person spends more than they make.  Nevermind saving for retirement, building an emergency fund or saving for a childs college education – most people aren’t even making enough to cover their bills!

I have bad news and good news:

BAD NEWS – Financial uncertainty is a huge cause of stress and anxiety right now for millions of people.

GOOD NEWS – It is easily avoidable, especially for young professionals with time on thier side.

There is a huge misconception that wealth is determined by how much you make, the cars in your driveway, the size of your house and how expensive the watch on your wrist is.  Wealth isn’t measured by what you MAKE, it is measured by what you SAVE.  Cars are a depreciating asset (they go down in value), homes fluctuate in value and people won’t pay you nearly what you paid Best Buy for the flat screen TV on your wall.  The point I’m making is that your wealth is what is in your bank account, plain and simple.  In my book The Course They Forgot to Offer, I lay out a simply financial plan for all young professionals to begin immediately and practice for the rest of their lives.  It will show you the easy way to build wealth, regardless of whether you make $30,000/year or $300,000/year.

Make sure to educate yourself on personal finance and work with a professional advisor – don’t be like the average America who spends more than they make and takes more time to plan a vacation each year than they do planning their finances (I’m not kidding!).

Young Professional Success Tip – Understand Wealth and Control Your Finances

Young Professional Success Tip – Understand Wealth and Control Your Finances

Now more than ever, it is critical for you to understand what true wealth is and have control of your finances.  Most young professionals have no financial plan or strategy, which ends up costing them significantly in the future.  Our current national savings rate is negative, which means that the average person spends more than they make.  Nevermind saving for retirement, building an emergency fund or saving for a childs college education – most people aren’t even making enough to cover their bills!

I have bad news and good news:

BAD NEWS – Financial uncertainty is a huge cause of stress and anxiety right now for millions of people.

GOOD NEWS – It is easily avoidable, especially for young professionals with time on thier side.

There is a huge misconception that wealth is determined by how much you make, the cars in your driveway, the size of your house and how expensive the watch on your wrist is.  Wealth isn’t measured by what you MAKE, it is measured by what you SAVE.  Cars are a depreciating asset (they go down in value), homes fluctuate in value and people won’t pay you nearly what you paid Best Buy for the flat screen TV on your wall.  The point I’m making is that your wealth is what is in your bank account, plain and simple.  In my book The Course They Forgot to Offer, I lay out a simply financial plan for all young professionals to begin immediately and practice for the rest of their lives.  It will show you the easy way to build wealth, regardless of whether you make $30,000/year or $300,000/year.

Make sure to educate yourself on personal finance and work with a professional advisor – don’t be like the average America who spends more than they make and takes more time to plan a vacation each year than they do planning their finances (I’m not kidding!).