The first year out: twelve things nobody tells you

I teach the trades intake at a college, which means I watch about sixty young men a year leave home for the first time. The same things go wrong, in the same order, and almost all of them are preventable with about an hour of warning.

Money

1. Work out your actual monthly number. Rent, bills, transport, food, phone. Write it down. Most people have never added it up and are operating on a vague sense that it's "about" something.

2. Move the savings the day you're paid, not at the end of the month. Whatever is left at the end of the month is always nothing. Even £50 on payday, automatically, into an account you don't have a card for.

3. Understand what a credit card actually is. Paid in full every month, it's free and it builds your credit file, which you'll need for a flat and a car. Carrying a balance at 25% is one of the most expensive mistakes available to you. Both things are true about the same object, which is why it catches people.

4. Buy-now-pay-later is credit. It goes on your file, it's easy to lose track of across four apps, and missing one hurts.

5. Check your payslip. Tax code, hours, overtime. Payroll errors are common and nobody will find one for you.

Work

6. Turn up early for the first six months. Ten minutes. It's the cheapest reputation you'll ever buy and it lasts years.

7. Ask the question. Every young man's instinct is to pretend he understood. Everyone can tell, and the cost of asking at the start is a fraction of the cost of the wrong thing being built.

8. Write down what you're told. A notebook, a phone note, anything. Being told the same thing twice is where a good impression starts to go.

9. Learn the names of everyone, including the people nobody bothers with. Cleaners, security, the stores. Partly because it's decent, and partly because those are the people who make things possible when you need something.

Living

10. Clean as you go or you'll live in a tip. Ten minutes a day beats a three-hour reckoning on Sunday that you won't do.

11. Learn five meals properly. Not recipes — five meals you can make without looking, cheaply, that you actually want to eat. Eggs, a pasta, a chilli, a roast tray, a stir fry. This is worth more than any budgeting app, because food is where the money actually goes.

12. Keep seeing people. Friendships don't maintain themselves once school has stopped putting you in the same room. It has to be deliberate now. Be the one who suggests the thing — everybody is waiting for someone else to and nobody minds being asked.

The one that matters most

You'll feel behind. Someone your age is doing better, earning more, further along.

They aren't doing better across the board; you're comparing your whole life to the part of theirs you can see. And the gap between people at twenty-two turns out to explain almost nothing about where they're at thirty-five.

What explains it's boring and repeatable: showing up, not quitting things in the first difficult month, and being someone other people want to work with. That's available to you today regardless of your start.