What advice do you wish you had—or had not—gotten about your finances after graduating from college?

This is a slightly modified version of the blog I wrote for the Wall Street Journal, which is posted here: http://blogs.wsj.com/experts/2015/06/17/the-financial-advice-i-wish-i-had-gotten-at-graduation/

For everyone, the memories of life after college are a mix of excitement and trepidation about what is coming next. For me it was also a transition year, as I had some teaching and research assistant work while applying to graduate school. Realizing now how important a time that was to think about finances, my first wish would have been for some advice! As a major in economics, I knew about Edgeworth box and Pareto efficiency, but not much about how to manage my (little) money. My parents thought an education from the best private college in Italy would provide the skills a young person needed to navigate today’s economy, but they never checked.

The advice I wish I had received after graduating from college and graduate school is about the importance of planning for the future—for retirement, for buying a house and so on. I have always been a saver, even during the grueling low-income period in graduate school, but saving equated to what was left over each year without any specific target to achieve. It took me a while to figure out that my savings were either too little or not allocated properly.

Had I planned to buy a home, I would have been able to buy it sooner and a more suitable house as well. But an early start in saving for retirement is where I could have benefitted the most. My retirement is likely to be as long as my working career. I sincerely hope that is true and a lot of savings will be necessary to support those post-employment years—and that cannot be achieved by leaving things to chance.

In my case, three things were needed. First, I had to figure out how much to save in order to retire at a target date. That required calculations, not just relying on the gut feeling about saving I had used after college and graduate school. Second, I needed a proper allocation of those savings. It was inefficient to save without taking advantage of tax-favored vehicles, such as Supplementary Retirement Accounts and IRAs, or to invest in managed funds that generated dividends and charged high fees. Third, I needed a system to keep myself on track and to evaluate how well I was doing. Even though I came late to understanding these future-planning requirements, the changes are paying off. Empirically, it turns out that those who plan for retirement end up with about three times the wealth of those who do not plan.  

One of the keynote speakers at our financial literacy seminar series said that it is very hard to support a 30-year retirement with a 40-year working career. It will be even worse if retirement is extended (longevity keeps increasing) while the working years when one can contribute to retirement savings get shorter. The latter can happen because of graduate school, repaying student loans and the failure to think about contributing to a retirement account.

I now ask the following question to my students when discussing the importance of financial planning: Suppose you do no planning for your vacation, you just show up. What are the chances that you will have a good experience?