Adulting — Days vs. Decades

Elon Musk once said," If you give yourself 30 days to clean your home, it will take 30 days. But if you give yourself 3 hours, it will take 3 hours, the same applies to your goals, ambitions, and plans.” For some odd reason, this quote has always been in the back of my head. But I think about it more than ever these days as I start to enter my mid-20s, a.k.a“adulthood”. What comes to mind when I think of adulting is: getting a job, learning to wake up on time, paying bills, understanding health insurance, not buying Starbucks every day, hating laundry, paying taxes, budgeting, learning to cook… all of it is part of the daily responsibilities of being an adult. Your to-do list grows day by day and it doesn’t take long for your list to stack up. I never understood how you can run out of hours in the day. Curious to see what the wise people of Twitter had to say about adulting, I typed adulting in the search bar to see the most previous tweets using the word…

SO, my question is how do people manage it all? 

My dad always says, "You make time for the things you care about,”. My dilemma is that I don’t have enough time for all the things I care about, while simultaneously making time for the other important things we forget to care about: health, career, relationships, finances, etc.  This brings me to Adulting lesson #1:  learning how to allocate your time. However, its not just about learning how to manage your time, but rather what you should be doing with your time. I have learned, especially through this field; that your time horizon and what you chose to do with it are two important measures in looking at your future. We as people must diversify and invest our time into things that will keep us stable and growing over the long term. The earlier you start investing your time into good habits, the more influential it is later. We’ve gone from adulting to investing quickly, but it all circles to the idea of creating a balance in your life, a.k.a. adulting.  

Think of this as your portfolio and where to allocate your money. We use this chart often which shows the overall returns of different assets classes from 2002 to 2020. Notice how the leaderboard changes between each asset class. Everyone wants to pick the best and put their money there every time, but as we all know it doesn’t quite work like that. Why? Because with all of the ups and downs experienced over the 20-year period, the all your eggs in one basket approach doesn’t work. However, a portfolio constructed with various asset classes, on average, will yield higher long-term returns and lower the risk of holding individual asset types. You can see this strategy with the gray boxes in the chart, the important factors of this are time and diversification. So Adulting is basically the whole concept of Investing I guess…allocating your time across the right areas to yield the best results. Let’s examine the definition of adulting and investing. 

ADULTING. "The practice of behaving in a way characteristic of a responsible adult, especially the accomplishment of mundane but necessary tasks." 

INVESTING.  “A person or organization that puts money into financial plans, property, etc., with the expectation of achieving a profit.” 

It's essential to know and remember that in your life, you must have a balance, and although this process can be challenging, aka adulting, in the long run, it pays off, even though the days can seem challenging trying to learn. Covid started December 12, 2019, which is 774 days, or, two years, two months, and seven days. However, as I look back, I realized the lessons I learned and how I grew from them during the pandemic. There were many rough days, as I know for everyone during the pandemic. As we reach the end of Covid, look at your experience and reflect on how you have grown in this period. Mine has been through adulting and investing; what about you?  

 

 ~ Claire Olmstead

Content in this material is for general information only and not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. All performance referenced is historical and is no guarantee of future results. All indices are unmanaged and may not be invested into directly. There is no guarantee that a diversified portfolio will enhance overall returns or outperform a non-diversified portfolio. Diversification does not protect against market risk.