What Financial Advice Would You Give Your Younger Self? (Week 30)

This week’s new question for TimingResearch member was, “If you could go back in time and give your 20-year-old self some financial advice, what would it be?”

There were 134 responses to this question. “Learn” was one of the most common words in all of the responses, being used 26 times, with the word “invest” coming close after that with 20 mentions.

As far as what to learn about or invest in, popular recommendations were for investing in good companies, trading based on technical analysis (4 people), and trading options (11 people).

One typical comment was, “Start investing immediately. Learn how to trade while you are young, and build that knowledge into financial independence.”

Real estate was another topic mentioned by a few people. Four different responses were related to real estate, two were generic statements simply instructing to invest in real estate while one said, “buy rental houses in good neighborhoods” and another stated, “buy farmland.”

Investing in commodities such as gold and oil were also mentioned by a few people.

Some other interesting comments were…

“Everything repeats itself, save more, learn technical analysis.”

“Become an options investor and purchase stocks that consistently raise their dividend.”

“Start putting money in a Roth IRA to save towards retirement. At least match your companies 401k program.”

The first question of the survey was, “What events/reports/announcements will you be watching for next week (April 21-25) that might have a positive or negative impact on the S&P 500 and other US markets?”

There were 101 valid responses to this question. The Ukraine conflict was again one of the top responses to this question. There were 27 responses that included “Ukraine” and 6 that included “Russia.” However, upcoming earnings reports was the most commonly mentioned upcoming event on the minds of our subscribers; 35 people mentioned “earnings” in their comments for this question. Unemployment numbers were also popular with 5 mentions.

What are your thoughts? Is there anything you’d add to the financial advice for a 20-year-old? Tell us in the comments below and be sure to check out the full report if you haven’t yet for more details on the above topics and the updated crowdsourced market indicator.

Download the full report to review all the data and comments, click here.