A letter from Oct 28th, 2021

Dear FutureMe, Financial planning is very important for your future. It's a way to insure or help improve smarter financial decisions. Planning for your future can give you a better understanding of what you should be doing with your money. If you don't plan on what you will be doing financially in the future, there is a chance that you could become short-sighted and lose a grip on your finances. It is hard to think of how day to day financial decisions can affect your long term finances. There are many ways you slowly become financially successful. One thing you can do is create a spreadsheet of your daily expenses over the course of a month. You can categorize those expenses into subcategories like necessary and unnecessary expenses. Necessary expenses could include things like gas, groceries, and all different types of bills/payments. This will let you be able to envision where your money is going. Inturn this lets you be able to figure out where you can cut back on spending. Other baby steps I do is working on saving a portion of my paycheck every week. I work every weekday so I can generate some income. I have also started thinking about my future a lot more. I have already had a conversation with a real estate agent and I have another one coming up to learn more about it. Now debt is something that people normally generalized as a bad thing. But in fact there is such a good thing as good debt. Not all debts can be bad but also you have to be careful they don't get out of hand and turn into a bad thing. 80% of Americans have some sort of debt. A reason why debt can be a good thing is that it can be used to build credit. A finance professor at CMU said, “Contrary to popular belief, being in debt can also be a positive thing, and could help you secure everything from a mortgage to a higher overdraft limit.” This shows why someone might not want to be afraid of a little debt and actually take advantage of it. On the contrary, if you have too much debt then that might overtake you. It can be hard to huge amounts of debt and paying these debts off overtime just leads to less money going into your pocket from each paycheck. Oliver I swear to god if someone you F-ed something up and you get stuck having to pay off a debt with a big interest rate in going to **** you. Not going to college is a good way to avoid a really big long debt. In just the US alone, there is a total of over 1.73 trillion dollars in student loan debt. This is a number that you cant really fully fathom. These debts for these individuals can take decades to pay off and even can lead to poverty in some cases. Creating a budget can be a very effective way to be able to see where your money is going and how to save money. If you create a budget then you can chart what you need to spend money on each month. This will allow you to split up your monthly paychecks and see if and how much money you have left over. Then with the leftover money you can decide what you want to do with it, if that's saving it, investing it, etc. Creating a budget can lead to success because you will not need to worry about where your money is going and it just takes the stress of money managing off your shoulders. This will allow you to better focus on your career or other things. Planning for retirement is something that you should do as soon as possible. The earlier you start, the more money you will have saved up by the time you retire. This is why I have already started saving up for retirement and putting money away. If I start now and keep putting money into my Roth IRA, by the time I am 65 years old that account will have accumulated over a million dollars. This will allow me not to have any money worries at all once I'm done working and I will be able to do whatever I want. In an article about the importance of saving up for retirement it says, “Anyone nearing retirement age will tell you the years slip by, and building a sizable nest egg becomes more difficult if you don’t start early.” This is basically saying how, the older you get the harder it is to save a safe steady amount of money for retirement. My last thing to say to you future Oliver. I swear to god if you don't have that real estate license and aren’t making bank. (Lets say $80,000+ this year of $60,000+ last year) then you are doing something wrong. You’re not working hard enough. There is no excuse to not be making this money by now. Like this of my dreams. Think of a life with Brooke. Think of traveling the world. There is so much I am throwing on your shoulders with my dreams; I just really hope you haven’t let me down.