An Open Letter To New College Grads, Soon Going Independent

With less and six months of college life in your kitty and the placement season hovering, a sense of adulting has already crept in the surroundings of grad students. While some of you are preparing for postgrad the rest of you are itching to start work-life and fly out of the nest, physically and financially both.

The good news is that you’re (finally) going to start making some money now.

The bad news is that money can slide right out of your hands if you don’t have financially savvy (i.e. rich) parents.

 

There are traps and there are pitfalls that new college grads can easily slip into. Not only will you lose a great opportunity to grow wealthy in the future, but you can find that all your hard work can be lost down a drain.

So, here are 3 key things new college grads must know about money as it starts coming in:

1. Cut the debt.

Credit cards are super convenient, but they can be a deadly temptation. Set a tight limit to how much you will spend and make sure you pay them off at the end of the month. If this advice has reached you too late, then stop every unnecessary expenditure, live on Maggi and cheap beer for a month, and pay them off. In this case, compound interest is your enemy.

How to start investing with SIPs- ET

2. Invest, invest, invest.

The best thing you can do is well, invest (did I mention that already?). Just divert your salary straight into mutual funds, stocks, real estate. Whatever. High risk is fine. This is the decade to buy. Don’t sell ever, just buy. Eventually, you will enter your thirties and forties, and your expenses will shoot up (it’s called having children). That’s when you will sit back and watch your nest egg grow. And grow. In this case, compound interest is your best friend.

3. Protect what’s yours.

Build a tight fortress around your pot of gold. High-risk investments are a great idea in your twenties (as part of a varied portfolio). But this is also the right time to start thinking of controlling the other risks in your life. Diseases can happen, accidents can happen, you can face liabilities at a scale that could wipe out a good chunk of your savings. While people in their twenties typically don’t look at insurance beyond a minimum health and life policy, you should look at some new policies that reduce the risk of the smaller things in life – a renter’s insurance that protects your things in your apartment from theft and fire, a commuter’s insurance that pays your hospital bills in the case of a bad accident, an anti-dengue insurance policy.

At Toffee, we can help you with this fortress. As an insurance startup targeted to the small and specific needs of millennials, we see your risks and we’ve built just-right policies, with the biggest names of the insurance industry, to cover them.

So make the most of your roaring twenties. They come once and they’re fantastic.

2 Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *