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I’m 20 from Australia, qualified in a physically demanding trade. I work early mornings, long days. I earn around $1,800 a week after tax including overtime, and in the next few weeks my hourly rate goes from $47 to $55 an hour.
I’m posting this because I want honest feedback, not validation. Where am I being naive? Where am I overthinking it? Where would you push harder or pull back if you were me?
My general philosophy with money is this: build slowly, test myself honestly, and earn the right to press harder later. I’m playing the long game, but I want leverage if I actually prove worthy of it.
I’m ambitious and not satisfied with “average good outcomes”. I want more, but not recklessly. I’m very aware that consistency beats intensity, and that most people fail because they scale too early, not too late.
So this is how I currently run things.
I operate off a fixed weekly allocation system I built with the help of AI, based on about 90% of my income so there’s always buffer. Weekly it looks like this: $400 for core living expenses, $160 for lifestyle, $300 towards a house deposit, $100 for travel or bigger purchases, and $600 into investing. Total is $1,560 a week. Anything extra covers weekly variance or goes into trading.
Every category has its own savings account. All spending goes on a credit card for points and gets paid off in full every Sunday. No rolling balances, no bullshit.
Lifestyle is intentionally tight. Probably tighter than most people my age would tolerate, but I work a physical job and I’m not exactly living it up mid-week anyway. I’ve built in room for excess because I know this isn’t sustainable forever. When income grows and life changes, I plan to let myself breathe more.
I also keep an $8k emergency fund that I don’t touch, and I’ve got about $7k sitting in VONG from earlier on which I’m no longer adding to.
For investing, I put $600 a week into US ETFs. Roughly 40% into VGT, 40% into VTI, and 20% into VXUS. This is meant to compound quietly in the background and act as a financial backbone. I don’t touch it emotionally. No tinkering, no panic moves, no chasing whatever’s hot this month.
Alongside that, I run a small swing trading account, about $2k. This is not income to me. It’s training.
I treat trading as skill development, pattern recognition, and learning capital preservation before there’s ever any talk of real leverage. I trade end-of-day swings since I’m in Australia trading US markets. I focus on sector strength, tight consolidations, breakouts and pullbacks, defined risk, and high ADR stocks. Capital only increases after demonstrated consistency. If I ever scale it, the money would come from slowly reallocating ETFs, not lifestyle or savings.
I’m not relying on trading to save me. I’m practicing so it could become leverage later if I earn it.
Medium term, the next 3–5 years, the goals are straightforward. Keep building a house deposit, buy a property when it actually makes sense, keep ETF compounding going, stay disciplined with trading, and increase income through higher paying roles, specialisation, or side businesses. I already proportionally feel the physical tax of my job I don’t want my income ceiling to rely on my body forever.
I know plans look clean on paper and real life doesn’t care. Fatigue, boredom, temptation, and bad decisions are real.
So I’ll ask again, honestly: where am I getting this wrong? Where am I playing it too safe? If you were 20, working a physical job, and thinking long term, what would you change? Am I underutilising my income, or am I actually protecting my future properly?
Give me your worst. You old bastards.