Most financial advice aimed at university students is absolute garbage.
I am tired of hearing guidance counselors tell 20-year-olds to skip their morning latte so they can be millionaires by the time they are 90. That is a lie. You cannot save your way to wealth when your income is zero. The math does not work.
I sat in a lecture hall years ago listening to a “financial literacy” guest speaker. He wore a cheap suit and drove a Honda Civic. He told us to put $50 a month into a mutual fund. I did the math on my notepad. At that rate, I would have enough for a down payment on a shed in about forty years.
I walked out.
If you want to leave school with a net worth instead of just debt, you have to play a different game. You need to focus on income generation and asset accumulation. Forget the penny-pinching. Focus on the heavy lifting.
The Income Trap
Your biggest problem right now is not spending. It is earning.
Working at the campus bookstore for minimum wage is a waste of your time. It teaches you how to show up and punch a clock. You already know how to do that. You need leverage.
I had a student ask me last year how to save money. I asked him what he did. He delivered pizzas. I told him to quit. Instead, I told him to go find underpriced furniture on marketplace apps, clean it up, and resell it. He made $800 his first weekend. That is leverage. That is arbitrage.
Find a skill you can sell for a premium. Learn to copywrite. Learn to code. Learn to broker deals between people who have stuff and people who want stuff. If you are trading your time for a fixed hourly rate that doesn’t scale, you are already losing.
Get Physical With Your Money
Digital numbers on a banking app feel fake. They are too easy to spend. When you swipe a card, you don’t feel the pain of the money leaving.
You need to anchor your wealth in reality.
I am a big believer in physical assets for young people. It forces you to hold onto value. A few years back, I knew a guy studying in Queensland. He had a habit of blowing his cash on weekends. I told him to convert his surplus cash into metal. He started looking for silver bullion gold coast dealers and buying actual bars.
It sounds old school. It is. But when he had a 10-ounce bar sitting on his desk, he didn’t want to sell it to buy a round of drinks. It sat there. It looked heavy. It felt real. He built a savings account he couldn’t swipe at a bar. By the time he graduated, he had a stack of metal worth more than his car.
Paper money burns a hole in your pocket. Physical assets sit still.
Protect Your Stash
Here is the part nobody tells you about building wealth in college. Your environment is a security nightmare.
Dorm rooms are high-traffic zones. You have roommates, friends of roommates, and random people wandering the halls. If you leave cash in a sock drawer or a nice watch on your dresser, it will walk away. I learned this the hard way when I was twenty-one. I lost a first-edition book I was planning to flip. It just vanished. No forced entry. Just gone.
Do not be paranoid. Be smart.
If you start accumulating hard assets or keeping significant amounts of cash, get it out of your house. Do not buy a cheap fire safe from a big-box store. A thief will just pick up the safe and carry it out.
Pull out your phone. Search for a safety deposit box near me and go rent one. It costs peanuts. The peace of mind is worth every cent. You want your wealth to be accessible enough that you own it, but difficult enough to get to so thieves can’t grab it on an impulse.
The Network is the Asset
I hate the word “networking.” It implies standing around eating stale cheese and handing out business cards.
Real networking is providing value.
The person sitting next to you in Econ 101 might be the founder of the next unicorn startup. The quiet girl in your coding class might be a future CTO. These are your peers.
I attribute 80% of my current net worth to three people I met before I turned twenty-five. We didn’t exchange business cards. We worked on projects together. We solved problems.
Stop trying to impress the professor. Impress the sharpest kids in the class. Show them you are competent. If you are known as the person who gets things done, you will never have to look for a job. Opportunities will find you.
Just Start
You do not need permission to be rich. You do not need a degree to start building a portfolio.
The world is full of educated people who are broke. They followed the rules. They waited their turn.
Don’t wait. Go make a dollar on your own terms. Buy something real. Lock it up. Do it again.