My Top Financial Mistakes In My 20’s

Honest moment...

I've made a lot of mistakes financially. I used to want to ignore them, especially after I started working in finances.

But then I realized if I can use my mistakes to help my clients do better with their finances that would make me really great at what I do!

Check out the list below with my top financial mistakes I made in my 20’s!

1. Increasing my lifestyle with each of my raises.
I remember dreaming of the day we would finally make six figures. When we finally did it didn’t feel any differently than when I was making $15/hr — not because it shouldn’t have felt different. But because we let our lifestyle creep up with our income and it ate all the financial margin we should have had in our life.

2. Not maxing out my Roth IRA while paying off debt.
This one goes our to all my Dave Ramsey followers. We were totally in the camp of not investing while in baby step two. Hindsight is 20/20, and looking back I wish we would have started maxing out our Roth IRA's the second we paid off our credit card debt instead of thinking we had to wait to pay off the student loans before we could invest more.

3. Being reactive with my money {insert emotional shopping}.
If you’re an entrepreneur you know the ups and downs of business. We rode that rollercoaster hard. We didn’t plan in advance, so as we increased our income we spent too much on things that really didn’t align with our goals. My mindset was always “buy it and I’ll just make more money” — not a mindset I’d recommend by the way ;)

4. Thinking we had to figure out everything on our own.
So many times we think we need to “get out act together” before we can ask a professional for help. Knowing what I know now, I would have started working with a financial professional the minute we started making money.

5. Not talking to my spouse about our money issues/goals.
When we got married I worked in banking and my husband was an accountant. You’d think we would have understood money LOL. But the reality was we were just two young kids doing our best. It was like the blind leading the blind. Once we made a commitment to talking about money we were able to set goals and make an intentional plan for our money.

Come back next month for a part two on how I overcame these mistakes!