Your Money: A Boot Camp for 20-Somethings

Financial Boot Camp for 20-Somethings: Day 1 of 5

It’s time to get your money in order.

Maybe you’re a 20-something who is struggling to make ends meet, or perhaps you’re settling into a job that is finally providing you with financial stability. But no matter your circumstances, what everyone has in common is the desire to make the best financial decisions.

This week, we’re going to help you begin.

It would be nice if there were an all-encompassing course that prepared us for this crucial aspect of our lives — something like Financial Adulting in American Capitalism. But we’re often left to figure it out on our own. How do you cover your expenses on an entry-level salary? Should you focus on paying down student debt instead of saving for retirement? What kind of health insurance do you need — and how much should it cost?

Our five-day financial boot camp will help you sort through all of these big issues in digestible bites. Each day, we’ll ask you to complete one small task that will nudge you in the right direction. (Today’s action item will appear at the end of this note.)

Your guides will be Ron Lieber, the Your Money columnist; Tara Siegel Bernard, a financial reporter; and Mike Dang, the personal finance editor. Together, we have more than a half-century’s worth of experience writing and thinking deeply about these topics.

And we all survived our twenties.

Action items

• Think about the aspects of your financial life that give you the most anxiety and those that give you the most hope. Write them all down and make a list of things you want to improve or optimize. (And it’s totally OK if you’re overwhelmed and don’t know where to begin; that’s where we come in. We’ll give you plenty of ideas along the way.)

• Make sure you have a copy of your paycheck handy, and then make a list of all of your active financial accounts, along with their user names and passwords. These may include: checking, savings and other bank accounts; all student-debt-related accounts; budgeting apps; 401(k) and individual retirement accounts; and health insurance.

• Do you have a burning question about money you want answered? Ask us here.