Maya shares what she wishes she’d done differently in the first two years post college. Looking for more post-grad advice? Check out this video:
Hi i’m maya and i’m the editorial assistant at the financial diet and today i’m going to be talking to you about the first two years after college and some of those fun mistakes that i make during my first two post-grad years so the first mistake that i think i personally made was that i was very hard on myself during my first two years out of college i think the
Culture around graduation is so like what’s next what are you gonna do where’s your facebook status about like how great you are right now and that for me translated into a lot of self-doubt and honestly all of that anxiety wasn’t helping me get a job it wasn’t helping me figure out what my next step was going to be um and i really think i could have spared myself
Some of that the second point is that i wish i’d considered moving home after graduation i ended up living in an area that was pretty low cost of living which worked really well for me but i think that i didn’t even consider moving home as an option because at that point i lived away from home for so long i think that was a mistake and a lot of us tend to say well
Like we’ve been on our own for three or four years now like let’s not take a step backward and i don’t think moving home is a step backward and i think sort of changing the conversation around that would have really helped me after graduation if i think about the amount that i could have saved if i’d move back in with my mom or my dad it would have been just quadruple
The amount that i’d actually saved if not far more however i think if you’re going to choose to move home it’s really important to get in that mindset of i’m going to do this and it’s going to give me a financial advantage because i’m going to be either banking money into an emergency fund or i’m going to be saving up for a future move or both i think it’s so easy
To get into the mindset of i’m earning i don’t have any bills to pay oh i can spend whatever i want and i think honestly it’s best to avoid my third big mistake was that i never really appreciated the time i had for hobbies when i actually had the time for anyone that doesn’t have a full-time job in a commute right out of college there is time to take on other
Activities i personally volunteered a few days a week and that was really great for me but i think it was hard to realize that like i need to be getting in this time now because when i do start a sort of career job it is a lot harder to fit it into the schedule not that it can’t be done but i don’t have like a tuesday afternoon to volunteer to hospital for five
Hours anymore and i wish that i had really made time to appreciate it that i wish that i had realized that real life doesn’t start when you get a job in your chosen industry that’s not actually how it works but that was very much the mindset i was in and so i think even though i was gaining really valuable experience after college because i wasn’t in my perfect
Field that i saw myself in for the next ten years it made me feel like i hadn’t started that real life yet and that’s ridiculous that was just discounting all that experience which absolutely didn’t need to be discounted one of the financial mistakes that i think i made right out of college was the fact that i wasn’t really understanding how to use a credit card
In the way that i really needed to be a while ago i asked a few financial diet contributors what their biggest mistake was financially right after college and i got multiple responses about credit cards and the fact that people sort of assumed that a credit card that you had just gotten was for emergencies you know if you ran out of cash it was like okay well put
A few hundred dollars on my credit card that isn’t really what you should be doing in an emergency in my opinion that’s why you have an emergency fund and i think that going into my first few post-grad years i really needed more of an understanding about credit cards than i actually had so first i would say that i wish i had understood when exactly i needed to be
Paying off my credit card what purchases were best to go on my credit card also sort of related to that i wish i had saved up a lot more for my first post-grad move because i think that’s what really gets people into that emergency credit card bind is the fact that they make a big move right after graduation and there isn’t enough money saved up and that’s exactly
What happened to me between deposits and plane tickets and getting my car out there i felt like i just rammed through my savings and i wish i’d had a bit more of a cushion another tfd contributor had mentioned the fact that she wished she’d started saving for an emergency fund sooner almost even when she was still in college and even if she was taking out loans
I definitely think that that’s a smart idea i think it’s really important to make the distinction between loans that you’re currently taking out for school and cash that you really want to have on hand once you graduate in case of an emergency because especially right when you’re getting out of school and you perhaps don’t have a job quite yet it’s important to
Have money saved up in case anything should happen i know when i was in my senior year of college and even for the first year out i don’t even think i really understood the concept of an emergency fund or at least i didn’t realize that’s what we were calling it and i think that it would have been so helpful for me to know that i had that sort of rainy day fund
In my back pocket another thing i would have done differently after college is proof read anything i wrote more i would say even if it feels like you’ve proof read your cover letters into oblivion it really doesn’t hurt to look over them one more time just like it doesn’t hurt to go into your resume and tweak it specifically for that job posting you really want
Honestly i look at some of my cover letters from a couple years ago and i’m like how was i not catching those typos but in the moment i was applying for jobs over and over and over that i just wasn’t giving them as much attention as i feel like they really need it i think in general i would have been more patient with my parents advice because they were giving
Me very very good advice in my first couple years after college but i was so worried about you know am i disappointing my family by not getting that perfect job like may 20th after graduation and so i didn’t really take a step back and realize the a their advice was really beneficial and b that it wasn’t coming from a place of disappointment it was coming from a
Place of encouragement so that’s all for our financial mistakes in our first two post-grad years as always thanks for watching and don’t forget to hit the subscribe button and go to the financial diet.com for more bye
Transcribed from video
9 Things I Wish I Had Done Differently Post-Grad | The Financial Diet By The Financial Diet