I had a guest post published over on The College Investor blog recently. It is a blog about personal finance and investing for young people. I thought you might enjoy it.
I met Robert from The College Investor at Fincon 13 this Fall. My first thought on seeing his badge showing the name of his blog was that it was about how to invest FOR college, not IN college. I spent essentially my entire 20s in school, and I confess I didn’t do much investing, at least in a classic sense, while I was in school, mostly because I was either broke or worse than broke most of the time. Then I got to thinking about some of the implications of investing as a student, and I think there are a lot of interesting advantages that a college investor may have. Read more here.
What do you think? Did you invest while still in school? How? Comment below!
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Sorry about that. Fixed it now.
I’m a veterinarian and am on the tail end of a joint residency/PhD.
I worked in the summers while in vet school, but making $12/hour, but it didn’t cover rent for a year let alone tuition. I had the good fortune of a loving support of family with means and graduated with no debt.
I managed to land a house sitting gig while in residency. Well not glamorous and filled my weekend with yard work/repairs, it drove my cost of living down to ~$600/mo total. This allowed me to save a large percentage of my income. Since 2009, I was paid ~$39k/year. Again, this was lucky as most people aren’t paid in school. At age 31, my investment total is worth a little north of $50k (almost all ROTH) thanks plus payment together for a small house with a rental unit in the back. The net cash flow to live in my house with the rental is less than an apartment. The whole key was keeping my costs low and having an income stream.
It’s not easy to invest in school. Graduating without debt makes a huge difference-appreciate it if you are lucky enough. I imagine the following is required to invest while in school:
-Living at home
-Some income stream
-Tuition covered
I invested in stocks with summer job money. Struck gold, actually. I was able to do it because I had my tuition covered, and I lived really cheaply (no car, used the library for textbooks instead of buying them, etc)
If I could do it again, I would do the same. No need to invest in funds at such a young age in my opinion. If I could re-do med school, I would put money in a Roth and trade from within.
Investing while in school is often an unrealized benefit of the military funding medical school. I worked as a teacher when my spouse was in medical school and we chose to continue living frugally as we previously had as undergraduate students. Utilizing the military signing bonus and monthly stipend we fully funded an emergency reserve, annually maxed out two Roth IRAs and accumulated additional investments while paying for a vehicle in cash and reducing undergraduate student loan debt.
Would we do it again? Absolutely.
Our kids started working as lifeguards in their teens and are both now in college on scholarships. One is headed to med school and the other to a Master’s program in biomedical engineering. We saved in 529’s from an early age to be able to keep them out of educational debt. We enticed them to start Roths with 15% of their annual earnings by matching them plus a little. We believe encouraging them to learn to invest early is important. One of them loves learning about investing. The other understands the importance of it but is less interested. The amounts in their Roth’s are small now, but we felt it was the best way to teach them the power of saving and compounding. Learning to invest by doing it is priceless. Any errors now due to the learning curve are relatively small amounts in the scope of their future earnings. Also, helping them helps our perspective for our own portfolio management.