After School Choirs Are Not Chores

When your teacher sends you home with a permission slip for after school choir, don't freak out about already having too many chores to do as my nine year old did. Just relax and spell it out.

Dress Like an Adult

Don't start your life with a wardrobe of t-shirts, baggy jeans, mini-skirts, and tank-tops. The best clothes you can buy are ones that stick to classic standards. For men, that might mean dockers and golf-style polo shirts. For women, don't wear anything skin tight or that shows too much flesh.

Get a Good Career

Don't shoot for the same career everyone else is. Computer jobs are super competitive. Every nerdy gamer in the country wants one. Firefighter jobs are nearly impossible to get. You'd have to start taking fire science classes in middle school and volunteer firefighting from your teens on.

Good jobs that pay decent money and are easy to get are Real Estate Brokers, Police Officers, Semi-Truck drivers, and Health Care workers.

Don't ever work a job in retail, manufacturing, or food service. It's a death sentence.

Buy a House

The most important thing you can do for yourself is to buy a house. Buy a house as early in your life as you can. If the banks would let you buy a house as a child, I'd recommend that.

It's easy enough to buy a house. Don't get an agent. Find a house on government or bank repo sites. Realtybid.com and tenmanagement.com are great sources. Buy a house that doesn't require very much work but is undervalued because of bad paint jobs, floors, or landscaping. The most work will come if you have to replace the walls. The most money if you have to replace the roof or foundation.

Get pre-approved at the bank before you start looking for a house. Use a huge bank like Chase or Bank of America.

Get a Dog

Dogs are expensive, make a mess in your house, require constant attention, and tie you down so you can't go on vacations or roadtrips. But, the flipside is, they will force you to buy your own house cause it's hard and expensive to rent a house when you have a dog. They will help you maintain quality relationships with your friends. And they will teach you responsibility. People with dogs achieve their goals faster.

Don't Just Go to College - Finish It

College is easy enough to get into, but, really hard to finish. Not finishing college is like dropping a bomb on your life. As if life wasn't hard enough, try getting through it owing student loans you can't pay off cause you don't have a degree.

Stay Out of Jail

The worst part of going to jail is getting out. Every time you try to get a job you want, your criminal record will put a stop on it. And decent jobs are hard enough to find as it is.

Pay Your Own Utility Bills

When you move out of the comfortable sanctuary of the parents abode you call home, you can become one of two types of young adult.

The type one young adult moves out and becomes a roommate living at someone elses house. Type one adults typically do not put any utilities in their own name. When times get rough and the other roomies don't like the fact the type one young adult isn't picking up their share of the dishes, the type one young adult is the one booted out on the street to find a new place to live. The moving process typically costs somewhere in the range of a few hundred dollars to a thousand or so. The type one young adult has a difficult time maintaining long-term relationships. And quality relationships are rarely achieved.

The type two young adult buys or rents a property in their name and maintains the utility accounts. The type two adult stays in one place for a longer period of time, achieves long-term quality relationships, and grows their resume.

Be the type two young adult if you want to achieve your dreams and have great friends.

Earn Good Credit

Not having good credit means years or decades of giving your money to landlords with nothing to show for it. Before you know it, you'll find yourself 35 years old with nothing to your name that you can't fit in your 1994 Buick Regal. And, if you start buying a home on a 30 year mortgage at that late an age, you'll be out of a job and retired before it's paid off. You may not even have a chance to sign it over to your kids before the government confiscates it to pay for your rent at the old folks home.

Best strategy, buy an affordable home below market value when you are 18 years old. Maintain your credit so you can sell your home for a profit and buy a new one every 5 years.

Don't Use the Ice Maker as a Science Lab

Some pencils have a mystical paint that changes colors with temperature fluctuations. And, placing the pencils in the ice basin in the freezer is a really cool idea... That is, if you are going to pull it out in two minutes time for more science fun. However, as my nine year old found out, leaving it in the ice is not a good idea. After about a week, it'll work it's way down the ice towards the ice crusher. It may just be worth the laugh when inch long gnarled up splinters float to the top of your ice water.