Seven money goals for young adults

In your 20s or 30s? Here are seven money goals you should make and meet.

3. Have a working emergency fund

Chris Helgren/Reuters/File
A piggy bank branded with the logo of the English Premier League soccer club Arsenal is seen in a souvenir shop in London. Setting up and contributing to an emergency fund is one of several steps a young adult should take.

We all know the importance of having an emergency fund, but saving up a good cash reserve isn't always easy. After setting parameters for what constitutes an emergency expense, there will no doubt be times when you'll have to pull out the funds to cover these unexpected costs. Now you're faced with having to put the money back into the account for later use.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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