My Top 5 Financial Mistakes as a 21 Year Old Investor With a $36,000 Portfolio I only started investing in September 2024, so I’m still early in the journey. But honestly, I’ve already made a bunch of mistakes that probably cost me thousands in the long run. To start, 1. Buying a V8 truck too early Ive been through about 3 trucks in my life so far and 2/3 have been V8’s. For my current truck i paid about $12k and while I do absolutely love it, the gas costs add up fast. I did all this while I could’ve bought a car for 3-4K and invested the other 8,000 and spend a whole lot less on fuel and insurance. Fuel eats at cash that could’ve been invested instead. As much as I’d like to deny it, my truck has been slowing my investments down.  2. Waiting too long to start investing I wish I started investing 1 year earlier when I was 18. Once you actually see compound growth working, you can literally see in real time that time truly is the biggest factor in all of this. 3. Holding too much cash at first When I first got interested in investing, I spent too much time “waiting for the perfect entry.” Also, i was scared to lose money, in september of 2024 i had $20,000 in cash in my bank account! Meanwhile the market was in the perfect spot to invest. I learned that consistent investing usually beats trying to perfectly time everything and ANY spare cash you have is better than NOTHING in the market. 4. Overthinking every investment decision I used to constantly change allocations, chase high yield funds, as well as second guess myself. Eventually I realized simple long term investing is usually better than trying to build the “perfect” portfolio every single week there’s a new ticker out or single stock or ETF is blowing up. Stick to the basics of $VFV$XEQT$QQC (which i wish i never sold) $VDY (again i wish i never sold it) and you will be just fine! 5. DCA’ing into crypto without fully understanding volatility At first, I treated crypto like guaranteed long term growth and kept buying no matter what. I learned that while DCA works well emotionally, you still need risk management and realistic expectations because crypto can swing hard. Everytime there was a little or big drop in crypto I put more money in chasing the lows. Im okay with how much i have in right now, I just wish I had a tad less and could have more in XEQT in my FHSA. I hope this helped anyone out there struggling with their financial mistakes. Again these are personal to me at 21 years old but if you have questions or comments feel free to comment!
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