8 Financial Tips For Teens To Achieve Financial Success

It's time to pull out a pen and a notebook because I'm going to show you that you can achieve a significant amount in your investment portfolio after tax by the age of 21 and how you can replicate the exact 8 steps that I took to get there.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is my financial guidance for all the teenagers out there or anyone reading this article. The first step is, you have to decide how much of your income (no matter how small it is) you're going to put away in order to invest.

It really starts with making the decision of how much you're going to put away. You might be making a modest amount right now because your parents give you a weekly allowance, and you might realize that if you put away a small portion each week, that's not going to make a significant impact.

You're right, but what happens when you get to a point where you're earning a substantial income? And that could very much happen for you in your teenage years or even your early 20s. If for 5 to 7 years, you've built a habit of putting a portion of your income away.

Maybe you were putting away a small portion per week to invest, and let's say you land a job with a good salary or maybe you start your own business.

As I said, you're earning a substantial income and you're used to putting a percentage of that income aside. That's a substantial amount of money to be invested, so the first step here is to decide how much money you're going to put away and invest.

Think about it not so much in terms of the amount of money but instead, the percentage of everything you receive and how much you're going to invest.

Bear in mind that when you're not making a lot of money, that percentage might be very small. Even if it's just a modest percentage, that's absolutely okay. The second piece of financial guidance specifically for teenagers is, find a way to keep that money away from you.

You can tell your parents how serious you want to be about investment and how by your mid-20s, this money you saved is going to be a substantial sum of money. Train yourself and get used to that by telling them "can you make sure that any money that I save as investment, can you make sure that I don't touch it".

Because something might come up, you might want to spend your money on something else, but you want to make sure that you never touch that investment purse.

Step number two is specifically for teenagers, just find a way to make sure that money is put away and no matter how tempted you are, you cannot touch that money.

My third piece of financial guidance for teenagers is, get a credit card as soon as you can and just spend a little bit on it every single month. Credit cards have so many benefits and personally, I wish I could learn these benefits a long time ago. I started using credit cards when I was 21 and bear in mind that at the age of 18, I was earning from a substantial profit.

I was used to making a lot of money by just using debit cards for everything which wasn't building my credit score and it wasn't taking advantage of the different benefits that you'd get from credit cards.

So step number 3 is, get a credit card and make sure you do not spend a lot of money on it, it can be a small amount every month. Just use it for something like paying your Spotify or Netflix subscriptions from there, get used to the habit of using a credit card every single month.

The fourth thing that I want you to do is actually set up the infrastructure in order to invest. Here's what I mean by this, for the longest time, I didn't really start investing until I was 19 years old which was a big mistake because I would probably have made more money than I've made today if I had invested much sooner.

One of the reasons I didn't was that investment seemed like a scary world to me and I didn't know how to set up a brokerage account and even some of the crypto platforms back in 2017/18 were a little complicated to figure out in terms of wiring your money and so many things. I didn't really understand anything about the real estate market and alternative investments.

In the year 2024, there are so many things that make it so easy to invest. It's very easy to take money and invest it, whether that be into stocks, crypto, NFTs, and even real estate is getting easier and easier these days for someone who's not a seasoned investor to get started and get invested.

What I want you to do is to set up your Coinbase account or any platform that you can buy crypto with and learn how to take money from your bank (could be a small amount) and know how to wire that and send that to your Coinbase account so that you can start investing.

I want you to start with "Webull" or any other and get signed up because that way, you're moving in a better direction in order to invest.

Whenever you walk past a real estate agency in your town or city, I want you to actually look at the house pricing and just get a feel for what the house prices are in your area. Spend a bit of time wherever you are in the world just to get to know why one house is worth more than the other and why one house is rented out for more than the other.

You don't need to become an expert in any of these things, you don't need to become an NFT expert but you can start to see patterns in things like that. Whatever avenue that you want to go down and for me, all of my investments are with crypto, NFTs, and watches. That's just the area that I am most proficient and understand the most.

So whatever way you settle to go down, set up the infrastructure to be able to invest so in that way, if you want to invest a small amount tomorrow you could do with no excuses that you can give yourself.

Now my fifth piece of financial guidance from someone who's started their business and now has a substantial net worth in their investment portfolio, the fifth piece of advice that I can give you is, investments are great.

But investments are not there to really make you rich, they are more there to preserve your wealth and to give you security stability for many years and decades to come. What you need to do, and the fifth thing that you need to focus on, is start a business or start some freelance side gig. Whatever you need to do to increase your income.

Now that could even just be a job that has fast growth company, many employees in companies make CEO-type money and every year, their income compounds. If you can find an organization like that, there is nothing wrong with having a job but I will say that there are very few things between and most times it's very hard to level up your income when you work in a job.

So the reason why I'm able to get to this point in life is because I decided to start an agency at the time I was 16 and I didn't realize what I was doing but now I look back and I realized I started a boutique online remote agency. And the way that I built it up was by using something called contractor arbitrage.

I was finding really good contractors and I would basically take their services, wrap them up with my agency, and then go ahead and sell them for double or triple what they were charging me. What they were charging me was considerably higher than what they were able to charge clients in their own countries.

That was basically the business model for almost 2 years and I was able to get to $40,000 to $50,000 a month profit right towards the tail end of being 17 and going to being 18 years old. And then for a while once the budget allowed, I hired people full time and my CMO was a contractor who worked for me four years ago.

So when I was just about to turn 18, that business was just doing over 6 figures a month profit. That meant that I was able to take all of that cash and what I should've done all the way from when I was doing $10k a month is I should have been investing a large portion of this.

All I did was sit on this tons of cash up until 2020. Now if you know about anything that happened in 2020, it was great for investing your capital. I had over seven figures cash after tax just sitting there. I put in $1,500,000 into the crypto market and within seven to eight months I made $8,000,000.

I also invested in watches, I had a watch portfolio. So as I said, if you're starting off with a low amount of money, you will not invest your way to riches and making huge money. Still follow all the principles that I have shared with you here but the big one is the fifth one where you'll have to start a business.

Step number six is, live below your means. Now I know there are so many millionaires out there that you normally see videos of them at the shopping mall and spend about $5,000 in just two hours and they buy some expensive stuff like watches. For me personally, I live up to 10% to 15% of what I earn.

If I make 10 million dollars a year, I know 10% of that is some money but it's all proportionate. I would be concerned for myself if I spend 80% to 90% of my income.

A lot of people out there spend more than they even earn, I don't believe in living below your means in the sense that there is a lot of these multi-millionaires out there who live very fully buying food and coffee.

You only have one of this life you're going to spend 10%, 15%, or even 20% of your income and you make a lot of money, who cares? If you're investing the rest of the money and you're protecting your future, and you know that even if you stop making money for the rest of your life you would still be good.

I know everybody has a different opinion but for me personally, life is there to enjoy and especially if you have the great privilege and great honor like I did and was very blessed and very lucky, don't get it twisted because everything in life, luck has a role to play.

And I was very lucky to spot the right opportunities at the right time, started a business at the right time but there was always a factor of luck involved.

But if you are privileged enough to make money at a younger age, you should enjoy this life. So, living below your means doesn't mean struggle to uncover this thing. I think when you're making less income like $5,000 a month, it makes sense that you spend 50% or maybe 70% of your income, I get it.

Once you get to a point where you're making multiple five figures or maybe even six figures a month, don't set your boundaries on what is and isn't impossible. Live below your means as a percentage, let's say in a hypothetical role, someone might look at anyone who enjoys their lives to the fullest and can spend 10 million dollars a year.

That might be so insane to someone but let's just say that person made a 100 million dollars a year and that person invested 80 million dollars a year, spend 10 million dollars a year and put 10 million dollars into savings. In this case, they saved just as much as they spend and the other 80% of everything they made went to their investment.

And let's say that investment portfolio yields them 10% returns a year. From that 80 million dollars, they have just yielded 8 million dollars a year passively from their investment portfolio. The reason that I say this is because someone might look at that person and be like "oh you're not living below your means, you're financially responsible".

I don't think so, for me it's all proportionate and it's all based on how much you make so living below your means only shopping when there are sales if you're a person who makes a lot of money. Let's just have that in mind. And this goes into step number seven and this comes as time goes on.

Step number 7 is you want to increase the percentage of your income that you invest. Once you get to a point when you start making more income, every year you should try to put a percentage of your income that is going to let your investment grow and grow. The reason that this is important is that this is the last final step and the final step is truly really cheap and that's freedom in life.

The only way that's possible is by consistently as your income begins to grow, establish through a business. You can browse around this website to find various online business models and ideas you can start with a high success rate.

As I said, go ahead and start a business and as the years go by and you make money, go ahead and increase the percentage of that money that you make that goes into your investment portfolio.

Now the last step, and this is really the truest sense of freedom and that's to only live off what your investment portfolio yields you. Let's say that you have an investment portfolio, let's say you're 25 years and you have followed all the steps I have shared here and you now have an income of 2 million dollars which is awesome.

But don't box yourself like that, don't limit yourself and your scope of thinking. So let's say you are yielding 8% off that 2 million dollars a year as passive income, the truest freedom is when your investment portfolio as in your true passive income, that pays for your life. If you can get to that point which is a cool stage where I am in life right now where my lifestyle can be paid for by my lifetime portfolio.

This means that all of the money that I earn in my entire businesses can go straight into my business portfolio. So this is it, this is the high level that you free yourself and free your family and I hope that this piece of article helped significantly. On that note, these are the steps and I will encourage you to keep on going and I can tell you that I am definitely in your corner and rooting for you.