Finance habits that every 18 year old should be doing in 2026.

For context, I'm 20 years old with over six figures saved and I do all four of these things religiously. And this is day 7 of navigating your 20s, a series where I talk about investing, budgeting, and internships for 20 year olds. 1. Use Credit Cards, not debit cards. These things, ditch them. We're only using credit cards in 2026. Can be scary because of all the debt assumptions behind it, but I assure you, if you can stay disciplined, the risk to reward ratio is so good. I'm going to Japan this year and I paid zero dollars in hotels just because I have a credit card. Literally the only way you can get into credit card debt is if you are not paying your card off in full. So always make sure to only use your credit card like a debit card. 2. Side Hustles/Extra Income. Number two is gonna be side hustles. I started selling clothes two and a half years ago and thank god that I found a side hustle because it is so hard to be buying things in this economy. The key note a lot of people slip up on is it's side hustle. So you should still be going to school if you're going to college, you should still be working if you have a 9 to 5. It's something you do on the side in your extra time. 3. Money should always grow (HYSA, Stocks, ROTH). Number three, your money is always growing. I'm gonna break this down into three sections into what I think is most necessary to least necessary. I do all three of these, so a high yield savings account is essentially a savings account that's gonna pay you interest for putting your money in the bank account. If your money is sitting in a Wells Fargo account or a normal Bank of America savings account, it's earning 0.01% of interest. Something like that. Putting it in a high yield savings account means that you're gonna be getting around 3 to 4% depending on the interest rate. So let's say you have $1,000 in your high yield savings account, you're getting paid $30. Now, $30 might not seem like a lot, you're making $30 from just having your money in a bank account. Next up is stocks. And you can pretty much invest into real life companies and make money if that company is doing good. And stocks have a bad stigma of it being difficult. I'm gonna keep it extremely simple. Just invest into ETFs like VOO or VTI. VOO tracks the top 500 companies in the U.S. and VTI tracks all the companies in the U.S. so you're pretty much putting your money at the top 500 companies, or all of the economy is going to not fail. Similar to stocks is a Roth IRA. The only difference is the Roth IRA is for retirement and you're able to withdraw your money tax free when you retire. Now, Roth IRAs aren't glamorous at all, but trust me, your future self would be thanking you. 4. Live below your means. And number four, the most important thing to me is just living below your means. And it's crazy because I watch firsthand just how crazy it is when people get paid, they automatically spend their money on unnecessary things. And I think your hard earned money should be spent and you should be able to enjoy it, but there's just certain products that are really unnecessary. So make sure, if you don't need it, don't buy it. Anyways, I'm running out of time, so follow me for part two.