Advice for young professionals?

Age:
25

Annual gross income from employment or profession:
€30,000

Debt:
None

Savings:
None

What specific question do you have or what issues are of concern to you?
Young single male living in Dublin. I have a goal of saving or investing my way to €50,000 by the time I'm 30 so I could afford a down payment on my first house. My income has the potential to increase with experience so I would expect to be earning in the region of €50k – €60k per annum by the time I reach 30.

How would I best go about achieving my goal? Also could you recommend finance/investing books or resources to increase my knowledge. Thanks

You have no savings, no safety net. You should save an emergency fund ASAP of at least two months salary in case you got sick or made redundant. You have no savings at the moment so this should be your first priority. This saving account should be off limits for everything, ideally having it in an instant access account, in case of........an emergency!

Once you have an emergency fund, you can start to save for a specific goal, in your case a deposit. I would open a regular saver account contributing the most you can afford per month (usually there is a 1K max limit). If you could contribute 1K per month for 5 years you would be up at 60K saved (excluding interest).

However, IMO you are highly unlikely to save 50K - 60K in five years if you are starting with nothing and earning 30K. A rough calculation indicates your monthly take home pay is around 2K, so if you saved 1K per month you would be left with 1K for all bills and expenses. Unless you have no rent to pay and spend almost nothing day to day, this is not enough to live on IMO.

I think you need to adjust your saving/investments goals to be a bit more relalistic

Personally, I also think an emergency fund is a good idea as a starting place.

You might also find it interesting to read the Mr. Money Mustache and Early Retirement Extreme websites. You'll then need a dose of "this will/won't work in Ireland/EU" - but AAM is great for that so you've already done yourself a big favour by finding your way here.

As username123 says, with an ambitious savings target like yours, you'll really need to go through the numbers carefully to make sure that you haven't moved from ambitious to totally unrealistic. And you'll need to reappraise on a regular basis, taking account of new expenses that might come up as well as changing salary levels.

We saved 40k in 4 yrs in our very early 20s...rent free for 18mths as lived in mobile home and never a spent a penny really outside basic needs, it was all focus on saving account figure...we had a baby so we were forced into saving...glad now as we own our own home so hav nice life for ourselves n our kids but your only 25, save money yes but enjoy life as you only get the one, you never know what life will throw at you.

Look for an investment training course (investing, not a course on trading markets). Google it, you'll find us!

How much are you going to put away each month?

You need to know how much you are going to invest before you know what kind of returns and levels of risk you need to get to achieve your goals.

Steven
www.bluewaterfp.ie