This is Optimal Finance Daily, Episode 1744.

If you are young and have a high income, treat it as a windfall by Kevin of financialpanther.com.

And I'm your host and personal finance enthusiast, Diana Mariam.

Now let's get right to today's post and start optimizing your life.

If you're young and have a high income, treat it as a windfall by Kevin

of financialpanther.com.

By almost any measure, I had hit the jackpot.

I graduated from law school in 2013 with honors and landed a job at one of the largest law firms in

the Midwest. In an era where law students were and still are, frequently finding themselves

unemployed or under-employed, I was one of the lucky ones. My starting salary and my first

ever real job was $110,000 per year. Here I was, a 26-year-old kid making a salary that my

middle-class parents had never earned in their entire lives. The most I had ever earned in a year

before was about $20,000. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average salary for 25

to 34-year-olds in the United States is $38,324 a year. I was making nearly three times that

amount. By my third year at the firm, my salary rose to $125,000 per year. I was a baller.

But, like almost all new lawyers or almost anyone entering a high-paying professional field,

I also had sizeable student loan debt, about $87,000 worth. So what's a newly minted 26-year-old

lawyer to do with this type of income? I worked hard to get through law school after all. Don't

I deserve to live it up? And that's how many young lawyers do it, or doctors, or dentists,

or anyone entering a high-paying field at a young age. The new lawyers around me mostly followed

the same sequence of events. Some bought new houses within a year or two of starting work.

Those that didn't buy a house lived in the hippest neighborhoods and in the hottest luxury

...