15 Investments You’ll Regret Not Making Today (20 Years from Now)

20 years ago. You should have invested in Amazon but didn't. $10,000 invested in Amazon. That would have been $1.8 million today. You've seen these stories before. 15 years ago, you should have bought a cheap apartment or house but didn't. Property prices have doubled since 2009. Ten years ago, you should have bought bitcoin but didn't. Some say you shouldn't even do it today, but that's another story. If you have money today, what the hell do you do with it? Are there any guarantee investments that will do well 20 years from now and beyond? Well, let's explore that together, shall we?

Here are 15 investments you'll regret not making today. 20 years from now. First up, ridding yourself and going debt free. Bet you were expecting some stock tips, weren't you? But if you actually look into it, your debt is costing you way more than you think it is. You take out a mortgage for $300,000 and by the time you're done with it, you realize you paid back almost double. And don't even get us started on credit card debt. As long as you have debt, you'll never be free. It'll be a dark cloud looming over you. And as long as someone else can take away the fruits of your labor for a missed payment, you'll never sleep well at night.

Paying off debt aggressively now will be the best investment you make when you look back 20 years from now, by far, by proximity to culture or interest. There are two golden rules of real estate investment. One rent might stagnate temporarily, but they never go down, and two, there will always be demand for rent around strong economic centers. These two together translate to the catchy saying location, location, location. Every city has two centers: a city center, usually the old town, where tourists come to visit, bustling with shops and commerce. And then there is the business center, usually where multinational companies have offices.

If you own property in the proximity of these two, there will always be people willing to rent from you. And special mention here is student housing. Not all cities have great universities, but if yours does, owning property within walking distance will cash flow as long as that university has students. And just as a heads up, the cost of refurbishing is usually higher and the time spans are shorter. Buy as much of earth as you can. How crazy is it that you can have the ability to own a piece of planet Earth? How crazy is it that you can buy a plot of land, put seeds in the ground and generations after you pass? They can eat the fruit from the trees. You planted unless your children argue amongst themselves.

Unless you have a medical emergency, there's no reason why land should be sold. It's generational wealth at its finest. Population is going up. People are moving out of the city, off the grid. Infrastructure is becoming more common. You can see where this is going, right? The gap between residential and agricultural land might be one of the biggest arbitrariness of our generation. When buying land and building a decent home costs less than the price of a city apartment. There is a misalignment of value placed by the market, and that's where the money is: putting your money in the S&P 500 and not touching it.

Truth is, you won't know what the next Amazon is until it becomes as big as Amazon. But there is a way for you to leverage the economic infrastructure of the most money-hungry country on earth for personal gain. An index fund bundles together the top 500 best performing companies in the country, and you can invest in this basket of companies as a whole. Most of them will do well in the foreseeable future. When a company does poorly, it gets taken out and replaced with a new one that's more promising. The S&P 500 does just that for the US. The index for the UK market is the FTSE 100.

Corporations are the most efficient machines known to man when it comes to generating economic value. So automate your investment toward them. Have 10-15, 20% of your monthly income, go into such an index and don't touch it no matter what. You don't need to time the market. You don't need to handpick your stocks. You just need to do it consistently and forget about it. 20 years from now, you'll have returned more money than the smartest people on Wall Street. Art.

And then there's art. The higher the number of super wealthy worldwide, the greater the appetite for the limited amounts of blue chip art available. Since premium art rarely changes hands, the demand for it is always at an all-time high, no matter the economic climate. Art has been a massive mystery for us. Until we took a look behind the scenes and realized just how much money there is in art and why the rich flocked to it as an asset class. Sotheby's iconic auction house recently released internal bidding data for the first time ever. They found that last year, bidding on art valued between $20 to $50 million surged 60%. That's when every other market was in flux.

This market is the world's most exclusive club, always in demand and has history shows us always going up. In fact, until our sponsors and Masterworks came around, even the world's wealthiest collectors could only get it during the designated auction season. But Masterworks, as a platform, has become the biggest buyer on the market. They've got over 300 offerings from legends like Picasso and Monet, as well as newer names like Korres and Banksy. They make investing in art as easy as buying shares so you can invest the same way the ultra-rich do. Over 883,000 people have joined the platform so far. Because since inception, every art sale they've made has delivered a profit to investors.

Shares from popular artists have sold out within hours. Normally, you don't have access to these types of opportunities unless someone lets you in. But a like subscriber can get priority access to start investing today. Go to Masterworks dot Art, slash, relax or click the link in the description. You'll skip the waitlist everybody else has to go through and jump straight to the good stuff. Invest in traveling. Everyone thinks travel is expensive and then you get old and realize your life passed you by.

When you look back on the previous year, what do you remember? One or two big events and the trips you've taken, right? Well, this realization hit us like a ton of bricks. However, since we've tripled our travel budget every year. Not only do we travel more, but we travel further. Your mind expands based on how far you travel from what you consider to be home. Spending money on travel makes you richer. You can tell someone's been places by the way they carry themselves, by how aware they are of themselves and what stories they're able to tell you. It makes you feel like your life wasn't wasted, that you've been places, seen things and didn't die in a self-imposed cage.

On 10 to 20 year time horizons, nobody regrets traveling far. Invest in your health. Every dollar you put into your health now will save you hundreds 20 years from now. Prevention is fractionally less expensive than treatment, but people don't do it because it's counterintuitive to how we've been brought up. You only fix something after it's broken, and that's ridiculous. Ask anyone who's divorced if it's working out well for them instead of fixing the relationship early on.

Take a moment to analyze your body right now. Do you feel strong or weak? Does your lower back hurt? How rested are you? Does just being asked these questions give you a migraine? One thing's for certain. 20 years from now, your health will be in much worse shape than it is right now. You'll have to spend ridiculous amounts of money to feel half as good as you do right now. It'll suck. Getting old sucks. Think of these investments as a way of making it suck less.

Investing in the relationship with your partner. You want to hear something controversial? Your relationship with your partner is more important than your relationship with your kids. They're okay. We said it. By the time your kids are 18 years old, you'll have already spent 90% of the time that you will spend with each other. Kids will be around you for 18 to 25 years. Your partner is with you until you die. The number of hours spent with your partner beats the number of hours spent with your kids 5 to 1. Although it's counterintuitive for your personal wellbeing, you should place more emphasis on the relationship you have with your partner. Date them. Wow them. Keep yourself in love with them. Make them continuously fall in love with you.

Take care of each other, go through hell together and come out bonded stronger than ever before. After location, the person you're going to spend your life with is the most important person and most important decision you'll ever have to make in your life. So don't take this one lightly. Investing in the relationship you have with your friends. It's not that after a certain age you stop making new friends, but because of the way human life is set up, you don't get the opportunity to make new old friends. So you're stuck with the ones that you've made. If you are lucky enough to have a couple that are true friendships, you better cherish them. Reach out, help out. Check in. Spend time together. Have your kids play with their kids.

If you're really their friend, you don't ask, "How can I help?" You see them struggling and you jump in and help. You don't want to die alone in a mansion. One day you're better off drinking a beer on the porch, cracking jokes. But some people find this out too late in life. Don't let friendships fade away due to a lack of communication. Rekindle your friendships. The older you get, the more you'll become friendship deflationary. You'll want to get rid of some of your friends. But going to a friend's special event or reaching out in their dark time is a freaking must.

They'll never forget it because you wouldn't either if their dad died and you didn't reach out. You're not a real friend. If they're going through something and you don't take it upon yourself to set them straight, you're not a real friend. The expectation is for them to do the same for you. Your human experience expands based on the number of people you get to share it with. That's why the alone in a mansion guy has a worse overall experience than the beer on the porch crowd.

In your finance education, since your wealth 20 years from now is the outcome of the financial decisions you're making right now, you better start paying more attention to what you do with your money. Most people live with the blind arrogance of ignorance. They believe they're smarter than everyone else until they look at their numbers. Numbers don't lie. Check the scoreboard. On average, every self-help book you read makes you 1% richer.

You read 1 to 3 of them, and it doesn't seem like much is happening, but it does all add up. You get to 100 of them read, and it's a very rare that your income doesn't double. Events might be ridiculously expensive, but if you go to enough of them and actually do the networking part the way you're supposed to, you might find clients and partnership relations that you'll monetize for decades to come. They pay off big time. The thing about financial education is it's an infinite game. The more you learn, the better you get at the game of money.

Ideally, you want to make it a daily habit: 10 to 15 minutes every day. Feed your brain some money content. It builds up over time. This is called raising your financial thermostat and we'll cover the concept in another video. The more you understand the flow of money, the higher your earnings. We're fed up with the podcasts that take 3 hours for 10 minutes of actual value with books that we finish in a couple of days. That could have been a blog post. So we went directly to the source and built an app around it.

You wake up and while you're having your morning coffee, you can put on your headphones and turn on the ALUX app. It distills the most actionable insights about wealth and happiness from world renowned experts in 15 minutes. It's been a game changer for everyone who's tried it, and we invite you to join them. Go to alux.com/app right now and start taking your financial education seriously. 20 years from now, you will tell people about our app. Guaranteed.

Invest in your spiritual and emotional health. People bottle things in only to explode out their lives later on down the line. If you don't heal yourself, you will bleed on people who haven't cut you. It's never too late to go search for meaning. But being 45 and still searching for yourself is definitely not a pretty picture. Find your version of God and do your best to live a life that would make him or her proud. If you're lucky in your search for meaning, you'll stumble upon peace.

Invest in your social skills. How long do you plan to hide behind the curtain of introverts? It's a decent narrative when you're 14 and scared of talking to girls or guys, but it's awkward to be at a table with someone in their thirties who's unable to hold a conversation. By the time you're 30, you should be able to talk to anyone. You should have mastered the ability to speak in public, to teach others something, and to lead. Not everyone will use these skills professionally, but you'll have to deal with family, friends, and other relevant parties.

Charisma, confidence, and social skills are one of the most underrated life skills that have a unique compounding ability. They play into network effects, meaning if people like being around you, people invite you places, they'll introduce you to other people. All of a sudden your access grows exponentially and so does your network. Be able to tell stories, to entertain people. Learn to listen, to show empathy, and to ask great questions. Know when to be serious and when to take life lightly. These are skills many people never master. And you've met them before: horrible people. Don't be like them.

Invest in shaping your home to be your safe haven. The average person has four places they call home. The first one is where you still live with your parents. The second is the first place you're in after you move out. Bundle up all the places you rent into this one. The third is the first place you actually own. And four is the home where you decide to raise your children. As you progress from 1 to 4, you should be able to collect a set of items that allow you to be at peace, from the little things like your favorite slippers or bathrobe to the pillows, mattress chairs, or kitchenware.

Home is where you know where everything is and everything is the way you like it. Imagine waking up in the morning in a place you don't really like, where from the second you open your eyes, you hate what you see. That's just no way to live. Invest in documenting your life. Humans have a time bias. The present doesn't seem valuable until you look back on it as the past. Taking a photo or video capturing everyday life doesn't seem special in the moment, but as time passes, its value goes up exponentially.

Print out your photos. They just hit different when you hold them physically. We went from not having any photos to having too many, but never looking through them. Although it might not look glamorous, document your early days in your journey. Document the struggles, document your first prototype, your first office. Document yourself at the year you are today. You don't have to make it public. This is for you. Upload it to a private YouTube channel and just leave it there.

20 years from now, when they'll make a documentary about your life, these will come in handy. Invest in being okay with who you are. Although this last one might sound a little bit broad, it's meant to encapsulate your mental health and your relationship with society. Pay for a therapist to help you work through your past. Go through a few therapists if you have to, until you find one that doesn't just pretend to know what they're doing. Invest time and reflect.

Doing so will help you understand why other people make you feel the way they do and why you gave them that power. Why do you want to impress and why? Who set up the expectations for your life and how do they differ from your own? Some people waste the first half of their lives pretending to be someone they're not. If you get it right now, if you find your voice 20 years from now, you'll look back on this as the defining moment of your life.

If you could do only one of these this year, but it would be a guaranteed success, which investment would you make? Let's keep the conversation going in the comments. And as a thank you for watching until the very end, here is your secret bonus. Now is better than later. An example, having a kid now rather than waiting.

Let's preface this by saying that bringing a child into the world is a massive decision and you should make it when you're confident you're able to raise them right. With the risk of being labeled old school, don't have kids out of wedlock and don't have a kid while you're still a kid. With that said, postponing the decision to have a child is usually something people look back on as a bit of a mistake. You don't have to wait to become a millionaire before you have a child. You just have to get to a point in your life where you're confident in your competence.

From a happiness and life purpose perspective, children offer an unmatched return on investment over hundreds of millions of years. We've evolved to love and receive love, to experience true happiness when we have offspring. Children will make you experience true happiness. It's programmed into our genetic code. So as you age, you realize that the quality time spent with them is beyond valuable and incomparable with anything else.

So when you make the decision to postpone having children, you're just choosing to spend your lower quality years of your life with them. You won't be able to keep up the same way with them. You won't be able to speak their lingo or absorb the things they're into the same way you could do right now. Society has deemed it okay to have children around the age of 40, assuming you're able to conceive safely and have the funds to pay for IVF, which is most likely required after the age of 35. Just run the simple math.

If you conceive when you're 41, you'll be 42 by the time they're born. On their 18th birthday, you, my friend, will be 60 years old. Not sure if you spent any time with 60 year olds, but the cultural gap is just too wide. And maybe you've never really thought about it this way, but it's something we want to put on your radar. Because if you are in your early thirties and single and hoping at some point to start a family, things should already be in motion.

Playing Peter Pan looks fun. Narratives like "I'll never get married" or "I'll never have kids" are way more common today than they were 20 years ago. Until you realize you might not get the option to do it, that choice might be made for you. Then things get real. So find your way. But act with purpose and a sense of urgency. If this is what you want, if you're committed to using your time to your advantage, write the word "clock" in the comments. Let's see how many of you just had a wake-up call.