Investing Advice for Millennials

Millennials have what you might call a bad rap. The stereotypes perpetrated by their elders would have you think millennials are lazy, self-obsessed and entitled. Apparently, they’re also eager to move back into their parent’s basement.

Emily and I are both millennials. We get it. The odds seem to be stacked against us. Soaring tuition rates left us with piles in student loans. Housing prices make it near impossible for home ownership. Retirement? Com’on, everyday expenses can be tough enough as it is. The struggle is real.

What it doesn’t mean, however, is that the struggle can’t be overcome. We’re fortunate to have been born in a first world country, with a support system of friends and family and an education to boot. That has helped us get to where we are today.

Everybody has a unique set of circumstances but getting a hold of finances and getting started on investing isn’t as hard as you might think it is. Here’s some investing advice for millennials that I wish I had learned earlier.

Time is of the essence.

Time isn’t something you can get back. Opportunities pass us by and often, they don’t come back.

One night in my university days, a long long while ago, I was heading home from some event or another with some friends. Our route home took us by an arch- probably 25 feet high- just outside the town’s city hall. It was well into the early hours of the morning and with no one around, we got to wondering,

“Hey, do you think we can climb that?”

Well, of course we could. YOLO, right? Without a second thought, we hopped the fence and scrambled on all fours to the top. High fives all around.

Ever do something stupid because YOLO?

You only live once. It doesn’t just apply to dumb things that seem like good ideas. Think about it. Time isn’t something you can get back. Opportunities pass us by and often, they don’t come back. Things that are worth doing should be done sooner rather than later.

Investing is one of those things. The miracle of compound interest works best over time. It works better over lots of it. The sooner you start investing, the better off your financial future will be.

FREE DOWNLOAD: Get the INVESTMENT GROWTH CALCULATOR!

Don’t miss out.

84 percent think that holding cash is best for the long term. They’re all missing out.

In the HIMYIM episode “Curse of the Blitz,” Steve passes on a curse to Ted Mosby that results in him missing out on epic, and oddly miraculous, occurrences. It was an effect so strong that Ted’s absence was to be the very cause of these epic events. Long story short, the curse gets passed on to Barney, everyone yells “the gentlemaaaaaaan!” and leaves him wishing he had been there. No one wanted to be the the Blitz. They all had FOMO.

There aren’t many instances where I would advocate for having the fear of missing out, but I’ll make an exception for investing. A recent Bankrate study pegs 26 percent of people under age 30 as owning equities. That suggests an overwhelming 84 percent think that holding cash is best for the long term. They’re all missing out. Don’t be one of them.

The study credits the dot-com bubble burst and the meltdown of 2008 with keeping many from investing in the market. As fearful as market crashes may be, it doesn’t change the fact that money invested over the long term- say 30 years- will outgrow any cash you have lying around. Don’t miss out on the long term returns of the market.

Seriously, doe.

We didn’t start investing until shortly before we had kids. Prior to 2008, we were throwing all of our savings into our mortgage. I had a fear of investing in the market so I procrastinated and put it off. In hindsight, investing those savings would have worked better in our favour with mortgage interest rates so low. The markets have since tripled. We missed out on significant market returns because we didn’t start investing sooner.

When I finally got around to it, I learned that investing is a zero-sum game and that the key to “winning” is about time in the market and keeping expenses to a minimum. I opted for a low cost index investing approach with TD e-Series funds. It takes as little as 15 minutes a year to manage and it’s all much easier than I thought it would be. Forget what the elder generations think about us. Let compound interest work its magic to keep your future on fleek. Don’t delay, don’t miss out. Get on that.

Do you have any advice for your younger millennial self?

1 Comments

Featured Lifestyle

Small Space Living: Our Condo in the City

Rewind seven years ago.

Daniel and I were in our early twenties and engaged to be married in a few months. I was living with my parents at the time and Daniel renting an unit in a basement. We had to decide where we to live after the wedding festivities. We thought about renting but after careful consideration, we bought a place of our own.

Our marital home was a 850 square foot condo in the north end of the city. The neighbourhood, though busy and bustling, was far from what I had wanted: the hip and urban experience of downtown. But it was still on the subway line, close to both our work, and cost much less than an unit at the city’s core.

We enjoyed the first years as newlyweds in the condo. Groceries, restaurants and movie theatres were all within walking distance. The subway was a five minute walk away and we used it on a regular basis whenever we wanted to venture further south for more culture and character. The condo itself, with two bedrooms and two bathrooms, was more than spacious for two people; we barely used the second bedroom. We made the condo home with the intention of moving to a bigger space when children entered our lives.

The American Dream: Big

North Americans like big. It is evident in food portion sizes, the vehicles on the road, and the ever so popular shopping destination, Costco. With big stuff, North Americans need space to keep their SUVs and wholesale quantities of Costco goods. The average home in the States was approximately 2,400 square feet, according to the Census Bureau. Ben Rabidoux, president of a market research firm specializing in Canadian trends, looked at house size statistics north of the border and observed the following:

The average size of a home was 1,050 square feet in 1975, but in 2010 the average home under construction was 1,950 square feet.

The American dream, apparently, is bigger space.

Related: The Cost of Housing in Toronto

Is BIG for Us?

As we neared the baby making age, many of our friends swapped condo living for more space in one of two ways:

Buy a house in the suburbs
Buy a house in the city for astronomical prices.

As babies came into our lives, we considered the options:

The Suburban House

We ruled out living in the suburbs rather quickly. We had grown too accustomed to the conveniences of city living. Need food? There are four grocery stores within walking distance, not to mention a butcher shop, farmer’s market, bakery, and countless of restaurants. Need entertainment? There are at least five playgrounds and a library within a 500m radius. Need to venture outside the neighbourhood? Walk to the subway. We were not willing to give all of that up.

The City House

We entertained this idea of buying a bigger place in the city. While we found a couple of houses we liked in areas we loved, there was a problem: housing in Toronto comes with a hefty price tag. During this summer, the average price for a detached home in Toronto reached $1.05 million which was an 18% increase from the previous year (2014). A bigger place would inevitably come with a much bigger mortgage.

Did we want to be house rich and cash poor? No, we like having liquid assets on hand and the financial flexibility from a smaller mortgage.

Space? Who Needs It?!

We were not willing to move to the suburbs or take on a much bigger mortgage- what did that leave us?

Embrace small space living.

We like having liquid assets on hand and the financial flexibility from a smaller mortgage.

The Center on Everyday Lives of Families at the University of California conducted a study of contemporary middle-class American families, observing 35 families over a period of four years. It was found that regardless of the size of house, families spent most of their waking hours in a small space, primarily the kitchen, family room and dining room. While people yearned for space and even had an abundance of it, it wasn’t always used.

My own childhood experience echoes the same observation. I lived in the suburbs in a house that was over 2300 sq feet. There were four bedrooms, one for my parents and each child of theirs. There was also a big lawn and backyard, a giant unfinished basement and a two car garage. During waking hours, my family congregated mainly in two rooms of our home: the kitchen and my parent’s bedroom. In comparison, the rest of the house was rarely used.

The Last Word

Choosing a home or where to raise a family is a difficult decision. It is critical to not let societal norms dictate where you should live; just because the Jones have a lovely house with a lawn doesn’t necessary mean it is the best option. Evaluate your own set of financial circumstances and make decisions based what you value. We fully intended to move to a bigger home when we started having kids, but at the arrival of our first and then our second, we decided it wasn’t space that we wanted but financial flexibility and conveniences of city living. Now, our family of four live in that very first home Daniel and I bought in the city. We use every room.

What rooms in your house do you use most?

Featured Travel

Seoul, Korea: Korean Eats

Korean Eats in Seoul, Korea

From kimchi to bimbimbap, Korean cuisine is readily available in many parts of the world. There are about a dozen delicious options, such as kimchi jjigae and bulgogi, that every one knows, but there is also a plethora of Korean dishes that are less known outside of Korea. When we travelled to Seoul, I made it my mission to seek out the Korean foods I haven’t had before; I came up with a list of thirty items and everyday was a quest to cross something off the list. Below is a summary of the top four places we ate in Seoul, Korea.

Street Food

The endless street eats truly dwarf our selection in our beloved Toronto. Food vendors line the streets, selling delicious snacks in their carts and stalls. The types of street food offered are extremely diverse- some odd (french fry encrusted hot dogs), some expected (meat skewers), all delicious. My absolute favourite was gyeran bbang, egg bread; it is an oval piece of dense bread, reminiscent of cornbread, with a baked egg on top. The savoury egg, sprinkled with a little salt, complimented the sweet bread perfectly, and since it was served hot off the grill, it kept us warm during long wintry walks outside. Another favourite were these little egg cakes filled with creamy custard. They were sold at a number of underground subway entrances. We found the best stand to at Myedong Station; They served their Deli Manjoos to order, so hot, we would have to wait for manjoos to cool off before scarfing them down. We would purposely go out of the way to make stops at Myedong station to buy a bag of their manjoos.

Gwangjang Market

Gwangjang Market came highly recommended by a friend who had been to Seoul before, and we decided to have dinner there late one evening. All the shops were all closed by the got there. We wandered through dimly lit alley ways with stores all boarded up; I thought we were in the wrong place and was about to turn around when saw glimmer of light and heard murmurs of conversation in the distance. At the center of the Gwangjang Market is a lively and bustling food area. There were stalls upon stalls of food vendors, and alleyways dedicated to specific food items, like gimbap or mandu (dumpling) alley! We had the famed mung bean pancake and gimbap- what the market is known for- among other things, like tteokbokki (spicy rice cakes) and odeng (fish cakes). Our favourite thing at the market was yukhoe, a Korean steak tartare served with julienned Korean pear. It’s absolutely delicious!

Nvoryangjin Wholesale Fisheries Market

Nyoryangjin is a wholesale fish market- the largest in Seoul. It’s essentially a huge warehouse filled with vendors selling live, frozen and dried seafood. Being a huge seafood lover, an excursion to Nyoryangjin was the activity I looked forward to most in Seoul.

We went late one morning for lunch. At Noryangjin, you pick your seafood at a stall and then bring it to a restaurant where they prepare a meal for you for a cooking fee. We wandered around the market, before randomly choosing a stall to make our purchase: snapper fish, scallops and shrimp. The total cost of our seafood totaled $40 CAD (it’s likely that we overpaid). The vendor at the stall filleted half our fish for Korean-style sashimi (more accurately called hweh); the rest of our fish was turned into a warm hearty soup. It was the first time we had hweh, which is eaten wrapped in shiso leaves with a dollop of fermented soybean paste. Yummy, but it was the soup that had us at hello; it was so flavourful! The rest of the food was grilled, seasoned only with salt and pepper. That too was delicious.

Since food was pricey, we decided it wasn’t worth money on the sannakji, the infamous raw octopus. The family sitting next to us saw our interest and was kind to share some of theirs with us. Daniel and I had trouble picking up a chopped piece of writhing octopus; it continued to wiggle in our mouths as we tried to swallow it quickly as we could. Not my cup of tea, but it was fun to try!

Kimbap Restaurant Around the Corner

We ate a lot of good food on our trip: street carts, stalls, restaurants, food courts, cafes and bakeries, old ladies selling food on street corners etc, but our favourite restaurant was a small eatery across the street from our accommodations. The restaurant was rather inconspicuous, without any big signage; I only noticed it because there was lady wearing a chef’s hat standing by the window front. The restaurant specializes in kimbab, offering 8 different kinds of rolls made from the freshest ingredients. The menu is only in Korean and the wait staff do not speak a word of English, but the rolls brought us back over and over again. We ate there at least four times. The food truly was trifecta: fresh, tasty and cheap; a meal, where we would struggle to finish all the food, cost us only 18000 wons (approximately $18 CAD).

Cost of Food

Food was more expensive than anticipated. We tried to mitigate food expenses by cooking in the small kitchen of our accommodations, but we found groceries to be costly as well. We generally ate breakfast at our accommodations, but that’s not to say we wouldn’t stop for a second breakfast (there was a street vendor right outside the subway station that sold spam and eggs on toast- so delicious!). We would “splurge” for lunch or dinner, and eat street food or kimbab for the other meal. On average, we would spend $40 for a big meal for our family of three and then another $10-20 on small eats throughout the day.

Last Word

Seoul, Korea is a foodie’s haven. There is food at every corner, sold from carts, stalls, restaurants. Skipping the dishes we were familiar with in favour of ones on my Must-Try List, I gained a better appreciation for Korean cuisine. Big Brother loved trying different street food- especially anything on a skewer. The baby in my belly had an affinity for all things spicy and I couldn’t have enough of budae-jjigae (army base stew), instant noodles cooked in a spicy broth with sausages, beans and spam. Daniel enjoyed Korean fried chicken and beer, and would have been happy to have that at every meal if it wasn’t for my mission to try thirty new Korean foods. We were very close to accomplishing my goal and checked off 29 items off the Must-Try List. I am sad to report I was unable to find genang (raw crab marinated in soy sauce) and am continue to search for it here in Toronto. I guess I’ll just have to return to Seoul one day.

4 Comments

Featured