We’ve all been there. Receiving financial advice from someone double our age, respectfully taking it in. They might be a parent, an older co-worker, or even a financial professional. Odds are, they’re giving you the exact advice they got when they were your age. There’s one problem: you know you’ll never follow it.

Millennials get a lot of flack for being lazy or entitled, or whatever other word people use to mean “doesn’t do things the way I used to do them.” Some millennials may be all those things (like some percentage of every generation is). But most millennials are hard-working. They want to get ahead and make the right decisions. They also have the chips stacked against them.

Most Money Advice is Outdated

Most personal finance advice you get follows the same vein: save 10% for retirement, wait at least 3 years before you even consider looking for a different job, buy a house as early in your 20s as you can, but only if you have a 20% down payment and the purchase price is less than ten times your annual salary and the monthly payments are less than some other magic threshold. 

I’ll give the people giving you this advice some credit. This was all solid advice when they learned it. Times have changed. Though these people mean well, they can’t understand what it is like to be young in modern times. Real wages have fallen more than 20% since 1970 when factoring in inflation. Your money doesn't go as far as it used to.

Millennials have had to navigate a job market mired with the Great Recession, stagnating wages, loss of pension plans, and soaring costs of higher education and housing. (For what it’s worth, the cost of consumer goods and luxury items is way down over the same period. This doesn’t matter though. Buying a house and paying for school make you spend more in one year than you’ll spend on televisions and gas for your entire life.)

In other words, most of the financial advice you receive won’t apply to you. It’s from a bygone era. Thank them for it, and move on with your life.

Your Advisors Shape Your World

What should you do about all that? Well for starters, begin looking for different money advice. Advice that keeps up with the times.

People say that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You should be seeking out people who will serve to enrich your life in some way. This doesn’t have to be financial. Your advisors will shape your worldview in every area of your life. You need to spend the time to make sure you trust what they’re saying. 

When I say advisors, I’m not just talking about people who you have formal advisor relationships with. Those are important. Even more important are the relationships you create with the people around you. Your close friends and family often serve as your informal advisors. They’re who you turn to when you have a stressful decision. Their advice, as well as their actions, influence you more than the advice of any formal advisors.

So how can you find good advisors? Start with people you actually like. If your personalities aren’t compatible, you won’t want to hear what they have to say. Then, look for people that walk the walk. You want to know their advice is coming from a genuine place. Anyone can tell you how to do something, but if they have no experience in it, it’s meaningless. Furthermore, if they did it in 1980, you can throw that out too. Some maxims in personal finance never expire (spend less than you make, for example). Most of the actual techniques change as the financial world does. Remember that.

Think About The Life You Want Your Money to Create

It isn’t all bad news for millennials. More than any other generation in history, millennials have the freedom of choice. You can choose what you want to do, how you want to do it, and even where you want to do it. 

The internet has brought on the era of the remote worker. Millennials are better able to take advantage of that than any other generation (Sorry Baby Boomers, you have to know how to access your email to work from home). Gone are the days of staying in the same town from birth until death, unless that’s what you want.

The first piece of advice I’ll give millennials is to think carefully about the life you want. We are positioned to be able to go out and create whatever vision we may have for our money. You can get a traditional 9-to-5 cubicle job in your home town if you want, or you can work remotely and live wherever you feel like. Work is disconnected from location, and that opens so many doors.

What you do with your life and your money is not a decision to make on a whim. Take some time, sit down and think about where you want to be. Picture your ideal life at 80 years old, and work backward from there. Write it down, talk about it with your advisors, and figure out how to make it happen.

Accept That Personal Finance Has Changed

It can be frustrating to think about all the statistics I’ve already cited in this article. To know that you’re doing everything you can, but people still call you lazy and entitled. The next thing you need to do is accept that times have changed.

You don’t have a time machine, and you can’t go back and buy a house when they were still affordable. You have to live in the world of the Millennial, with all its positives and negatives. Wouldn’t you rather focus on what you can control? As long as you are spending within your means and in line with your values, who cares that it’s a little bit tougher to get ahead financially? You'll get there.

Once you accept that this is the new normal, you can begin navigating the current financial world. You can do what you can with your money to meet your personal financial goals. Don’t waste your time blaming other people for wrecking the economy. Get out, earn your money, and spend and save so you can live a life that excites you. A life full of purpose, peace, and community.

The Financial Industry Can’t Keep Up

No industry is more traditional than the financial industry. When it comes to money, people love to assume that the way it’s always worked will be the way it works forever. Budgeting rules of thumb get created in 1970 and remain touted as the way to manage your money even 50 years later. That’s ludicrous. 

Traditional industries seldom keep up with changing times. There’s a reason the world’s most valuable company from 1970 isn’t still at the top of the list. As companies and industries grow, two major things happen. They increase in complexity, and they get set in their ways.

Increasing complexity means every decision that gets made takes a lot longer. It has to filter through more steps, changing and watering down as it goes. Or it gets abandoned altogether. 

In the world of personal finance, that means that what starts out as simple advice gets bloated over time. What begins as “make sure you invest” becomes “invest only through mutual funds at your brokerage with an expense ratio between 1 and 2 percent, but make sure you time weight your deposits and keep up with re-balancing.” That system is a lot harder to tweak.

Traditional industries also get more set in their ways as they age. “That’s how we’ve always done it” doesn’t hold nearly as much weight in a 1-year-old institution as it does in a 50 year old one. Look at the Catholic Church: a lot of their traditions date back well over 1,000 years. Anyone who attempts to update them is met with sharp criticism and hatred. 

While there’s something to be said for tradition and ceremony when it comes to religion, that argument has no leg to stand on in the realm of personal finance.

Unfortunately, most personal finance experts don’t seem to care. They’re still giving the exact same advice they gave when they first started out. Some of it is bound to be useful, but most of it is outdated and no longer reflects reality.

Focus On Your Community

We used to be forced to focus on our community. Except for the ultra-wealthy, most people didn’t have a choice. They grew up, got educated, got a job, and raised a family of their own all within a few miles of one another. This type of close physical proximity to the same people throughout their lives built a community.

That forced physical proximity no longer exists. Most people go off to college, and a large portion of them don’t move back to their hometowns. That’s fine. Modern technology allows us to stay connected to our friends and family without needing to live 2 houses down from them. Unfortunately, most personal finance advice doesn’t factor this in.

There’s an implicit understanding in traditional personal finance advice that you already have a community. Because the industry is so set in its ways, it assumes that social safety net will be there for you. I’m not saying most money experts actually believe a majority of people still spend their entire lives within a few square miles. That would be ridiculous. But that understanding forms one of the baselines of most of their advice.

In the modern era, we have to get back to basics a little bit. Before you can take the types of risks or achieve the types of goals that previous generations have considered foregone conclusions, you have to start with your community. That may mean getting involved with local civic organizations. Or it may mean cultivating online relationships and building your support network in the cloud.

Wherever and however you choose to create your community, it’s important to have one. The earlier you can get plugged into one, or create your own, the better. Your community will be your crutch. They support you emotionally as you take money risks, and act as those informal advisors I talked about earlier. 

Depending on how much they like you, they might ever support you financially if a risk doesn’t pan out.

More than any other generation, you are in control of what your community looks like. Use that to your advantage. Choose the people you like. People who will build you up and help you reach your dreams faster.

Don’t Shy Away From Investing

Three in five young people have no stock market exposure, according to a study from the St. Louis Federal Reserve. This is honestly insane. Investing is fundamental to living a life that excites you. 

This lack of investing is having very serious consequences. Another study from the St. Louis Fed found that “an American born in 1970 is likely to have 40 percent less wealth over their lifetimes than someone born in 1940.” Something tells me there's a correlation there.

Not investing is a major mistake that way too many young people are making. You put yourself behind the ball by waiting to get started until you’re older. Compound interest needs time to work its magic, and the more time you give it the better.

The other day, I was talking to my sister about investing in the Roth IRA I made her open. For some context, she is 4 years younger than me. 

I crunched some numbers and found something baffling. If she invests $20 a month from now until she’s 65, she’ll have invested $46,000 but have over $112,000 in the account, assuming an 8% return per year. Meanwhile, if I invested the exact same $20 a month until I was 65, I’d put in right around $42,000 to have $80,000.

Waiting just 4 years would eliminate $30,000 in gains, even though the money wouldn’t be touched for decades.

Investing in stocks is the best way to guarantee that you’ll be able to live the life you want. That doesn’t mean you need to become a broker and find the next “hot” stock, though. You definitely shouldn’t do that. 

Everyone from legendary investor Warren Buffett to personal finance expert Ramit Sethi says you should invest your money in the simplest possible way: index funds. Sethi spends a lot of time in his book “I Will Teach You To Be Rich” talking about why index funds are superior, and how you should set up your investments to work for you. I recommend you check it out.

I hope you’ve seen the importance of starting early on your investments. The earlier you start, the faster you’ll build wealth and get on track to a life that excites you. The other benefit of starting early is this: it’s okay to start small. 

You don’t need a ton of money to invest since you will have so long to let the money grow. It’s way more important that you maintain consistency, so pick a number that you know you’ll reliably be able to hit. You can start like my sister with $20 a month. Just make sure you start.

Use Technology To Get Your Money There Faster

Younger generations know technology better than older ones do. We have been immersed in technology for larger portions of our lives. Sure, older millennials can definitely remember a time before the internet. And I hope everyone who’s an adult now remembers a time before smartphones and ubiquitous connectivity.

On a whole though, we grasp technology better than our parents. We are quicker to adopt new technologies, and still young enough not to be as stubborn about “how it’s always been done.”

You can and should use that understanding of technology to make up for lost ground with your money. Modern technology hasn’t just given us Netflix and Facebook, it has given us so many ways to manage our money better than ever before.

The first example I’ve already discussed: index funds. Index funds, and the firms that dominate their market such as Vanguard, are entirely modern phenomena. They allow you to take a minimal risk, high reward approach to investing with very little money down and very low fees. In other words, index funds are the broke, scared millennial’s best friend when it comes to investing.

Another modern development to take advantage of is online-only banks. Gone are the days of waiting in a long line for the teller at the bank to deposit your physical paycheck. Now, you can direct deposit that check into a bank that you couldn’t visit the branch of even if you wanted to. This has major advantages, allowing you to earn more interest on your money than you could at a brick-and-mortar bank.

Here’s the kicker: technology also allows both of these things, and so many more money hacks, to be automated. You can put your money on auto-pilot and spend more of your time actually out there living the life you want. How great is that?

Don’t shy away from your understanding of technology, or think it’s only useful for entertainment or work. Embrace your designation as the technology generation, and use it to build wealth and live a life that excites you. Technology can help you reach your financial goals faster than you ever dreamed.

Don’t Manage Your Money In The Past

Don’t settle for ordinary when it comes to your money. After all, ordinary is the way it's always been done. Ordinary is the outdated money advice that doesn’t work anymore. When it comes to your money, find a new road. Build a community you enjoy, find people you trust, and use technology to unlock your money’s true potential.

Forge a new path that fits with modern times. That may mean you stay in your hometown close to family and take a traditional office job, sure. Or it may mean you work remotely and spend your time traveling the country or the world. Your money is a tool to live a life that excites you. Only you can decide what that life looks like.

I’m not saying that everything about traditional money advice is bad. There is certainly a lot of solid, timeless personal finance advice out there. Ultimately, it’s up to you to decide what personal finance wisdom is worth keeping, and what is outdated.