Hey guys.

It's Chelsea from The Financial Diet. And this week's video is brought to you by Wealthsimple.

And today, because tomorrow is Halloween, I wanted to do something extremely spooky and talk about the spookiest thing in my life, which is turning 30. Woo! That's actually kind of a joke.

I'm actually really excited to turn 30. But I know that for a lot of us, the idea of coming to that 30-year mark can be really overwhelming and make you kind of ask a lot of questions about who you are and what you've accomplished and all that other stuff. So I want to de-spookify by talking about some of the aspects of turning 30 that you maybe don't always hear about.

So let me act as a spoiler for the horror film that is turning 30 by sharing with you guys six of the scariest things about turning that age. Number one is you can't afford the adult things you 'should' own. Wooo-- OK, I'm going to stop making spooky noises.

So something that makes 30 feel like a really intimidating age for a lot of us is that we've usually grown up with this idea in our head of what 30 is supposed to look like. And unfortunately, a lot of that stuff tends to be dictated by material things. Whether you came up watching Sex In The City or Entourage or Friends or 30-Something, you probably have an image in your mind of what that age looks like that is more financially established than you are personally likely to be.

In fact, I did a whole video about these grown up expenses that are wastes of our money, and I'll link you guys to that in the description. But it kind of breaks down this whole mental image we have around what makes you an adult. And unfortunately, a lot of those things are just expensive shit.

I, personally, am someone who has quite a lot of anxiety around the idea of living in a New York City apartment that I perceive to be a 30-something apartment going into this age. If you guys follow me on Instagram-- and I'll link you to that as well in the description-- you see that I spend a lot of time on things like decorating my home or having parties at home or doing things that make me feel like a grown up, but it can be a never ending cycle of not feeling like you're good enough or you have that thing. In fact, just this morning I was talking to my coworkers about how I need to unfollow a lot of decor blogs on Instagram because they're slowly driving me insane.

And when it comes to pop culture, research has shown just how expensive some of these images that we've totally normalized tend to be. If you take Carrie Bradshaw, for example, her spending habits total to about $1,458 a month on shopping, about $470 on food, and around $1,200 on transportation every month. And when it comes to Friends and their colorful 20-something apartments, those apartments would rent from anywhere from $4,500 to $14,000 a month in today's New York City real estate market.

The KitchenAid mixer you see in every decor magazine and cooking show? They average around $350. The fancy cocktails every pop culture character is sipping on TV and in movies?

In big cities, they easily run $15 or more at hip bars. Even home prices, which to us can often feel like the ultimate material symbol of being an adult, have steadily risen almost every single year. Adjusted for inflation, the average home is now about two times as expensive as it was 50 years ago.

The point of all of this, and a big part of what has allowed me to feel good about going into 30, is to remember that there is no one thing that will make you more of an adult that you can buy at the store. Every time I've caught myself feeling insecure about what I have compared to what I've always grown up thinking I should have, I remember that those goalposts are in my head, and 30 looks radically different for everyone. I don't have a KitchenAid stand mixer because I have other financial priorities.

Does that make me feel like a little bit less of a grown up domestic goddess? Sometimes. But can I easily snap myself out of it?

Yes. Whatever that purchase is that you feel like you need to make to be an adult, remember, the only thing that makes you a real grown up is you. Number two is that every day you don't invest, you lose money.

So here's a spooky fact. Around 70% of millennials are not saving for retirement at all. Woo!

Ghost noises. And when you consider factors like massive student loan debt, precarious employment, the fact that on some level, none of us ever want to imagine ourselves as old, myself included, it's totally understandable why this is something that many people can just throw to the bottom of their list. But one of the most scary things about money can also be one of the most empowering, if you learn to take control of it and use it to your advantage.

Simply put, every day you do not invest is a day that you have lost money. It's a day in which you've missed out on compound interest, and it's also a day in which you've spent that money on something that is ultimately less valuable to you and your future. "Many of us tend to say, I'll get to retirement savings later, or I have all the time in the world," certified financial planner Carrie Schwab-Pomerantz tells CNBC Make It. "Consider the minus 10% rule. If you're in your 20s and you put aside at least 10%, you should have a relatively comfortable retirement at age 65.

But if you wait until your 30s, you have to save 15% to 20% of your income. And in your 40s you have to save 30%." Ultimately, though, you can use something like an upcoming birthday, like, for example, turning 30, as I'm going to do very soon, as a chance to really take the time to do something that treats your future self as just as important as your today self, because that person is just as important and just as much you. And you can get started today with Wealthsimple.

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Check them out at wealthsimple.com/TFD or use the link in our description. You can get started with literally $1, and it only takes a few minutes. No excuses.

Number three is you are slowly turning into your parents. Boo! So recently I have come to terms with a way in which I am quite literally turning into my mother.

My mother has a habit-- and I love her-- of doing what I refer to as drive by criticism. She will just walk by things, often in my apartment, and without really trying to or meaning to, just sort of absent-mindedly critique things. And my mom's approval and taste, I both put a lot of stock in, so often I am left feeling slightly crushed, but also motivated to do better.

And I catch myself doing it all the time to other people, which I know probably doesn't make them feel great. But it's like a compulsion that comes from somewhere deep inside me, and I can't understand. I just have to look at the flowers and be like, do you want me to cut those for you or something?

Like, you know what I'm saying? It's not mean things. It's just I can't help myself.

And maybe you've noticed some things that you share with your parents like that. Or you've noticed that certain things, as you get close to 30, don't really light you up in the same way they used to when you were in your early 20s. And beyond just little habits, such as drive by criticisms, there are actually probably very literal ways in which you are becoming like your parents, especially if you're a man.

Working sons of working fathers are, on average, 2.7 times as likely as the rest of the population to have the same job, but only two times as likely to have the same job as their working mothers, according to an analysis by The New York Times. Daughters are only 1.8 times as likely to have the same job as their mothers, and 1.7 times as likely to have the same job as their fathers. But simply put, as we get older, we start to get drawn to things that are just more appealing to older people, our parents included, and just generally living a calmer and more settled existence starts to feel more appealing to you.

One survey found that people in their 30s are more risk-averse and less likely to do things like book a spontaneous vacation, stay out late on a weeknight, change jobs, or ask someone out. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, though. Our definition of happiness just gets different as we get older.

Psychologists Cassie Mogliner, Sepandar Kamvar, and Jennifer Aaker looked for evidence of how our sense of happiness changes with age by analyzing 12 million personal blogs. Specifically, they were interested in seeing what kinds of emotions the bloggers mentioned when they talked about feeling happy. They found that younger bloggers described experiences of happiness as being times when they felt excited, ecstatic, or elated, while older bloggers were more inclined to describe happy experiences of moments of feeling peaceful, relaxed, calm, or relieved.

So if you're getting close to 30 and realizing that you are starting to be weirdly fulfilled by the act of apartment gardening and you kind of think you're turning into your mother, embrace that and understand that it's natural for our definitions of what makes us happy and what we should be striving for every day can naturally change. Like Pokemon, we are allowed and even encouraged to evolve. And just because our lives may no longer be the roller coasters of our early 20s does not mean they cannot be deeply enjoyable.

And frankly, let's all be honest, sometimes it feels really good to no longer be in your early 20s. Number four is that you probably don't own a home. So above almost everything else, as I mentioned, being a homeowner is probably one of the number one things that you grew up associating with adulthood.

But today, many people do not own homes until they are well past the age of 30, and for a lot of good reasons. According to a new report from the Urban Institute, the homeownership rate at ages 25 to 34 for millennials, as defined here as those born between 1981 and 1997, is currently 37%. But at the same age range for Gen Xers, those born between 1965 and 1980, the homeownership rate was 45.4%.

And part of that has to do with the fact that we're just not settling down as quickly. In 1990, 52.3% of 18 to 34-year-olds were married. In 2015, it was just 38.5%.

And thanks to a variety of factors-- [FAKE COUGH] student loans-- [FAKE COUGH] more millennials are now living at home with their parents than many previous generations. When they graduate, the average student loan borrower has $37,172 in student loans, a $20,000 increase from 13 years ago. And for the record, that's about the same amount as a 20% down payment on a $185,000 house.

The point is, if you are at or near 30 and do not own a home and feel kind of far from owning a home, remember that you are very much not alone and that there are very many things working against you today that weren't even a thing in the era of your parents. So if they're putting a lot of undue pressure on you that feels unrealistic, you're right. It was very different when they were buying a home for many different reasons.

Above all, remember to not rush yourself into any financial decision that isn't right for you because you feel a societal pressure to do it. You can afford what you can afford and you can't afford what you can't afford. Everything else is just noise.

Number five is you may never outgrow your skin problems. Now you may not know it from the deftness with which I spackle my face every time I'm about to get in front of the camera, but I have adult acne. I also have rosacea.

It's something I've dealt with my whole life. And my whole life, I've had this unspoken expectation that on my 30th birthday I would blow out the candles with a pore-free and beautifully toned face. And that's clearly not going to happen.

And especially when you associate your skin problems with being an awkward, self-conscious teenager, as most people tend to, myself included, it can make you feel like even more of a perpetual child than you otherwise would. But I take a small comfort in knowing that in my spotty distress, I am not alone. Clinical studies indicate that between 40 and 55% of the adult population age 20 to 40 are diagnosed with low grade persistent acne and oily skin.

According to the Journal of American Academy of Dermatology, 54% of women older than 25 have some facial acne. And here's something that people with bad skin know and good skin think that we're lying about. Skin problems can have a huge effect on your financial and professional prospects.

Adults with acne face higher rates of unemployment than the general population. I somehow knew that, but it was still sad reading that. And that is outside of the emotional and psychological impacts of bad skin, which are very real.

Major depression is one of the main results of chronic skin disorders. Suicidal thoughts are another consequence. Consider some statistics on psoriasis.

About 5% of the 4.5 million American adults with psoriasis have suicidal thoughts, three times the rate of the general population. And while there's no quick solution to this, something that I think is really important is to always be updating your expectations of what your body should look like. It's really easy to get ideas in our head that we will look a certain way by a certain age, whether it's because we'll have enough money to do it or because we feel like we'll somehow magically get more attractive as we get older.

I don't know what everyone's thinking, but I know I thought that I was not going to have acne at 30. But I do, and I probably will at 40. And the truth is that unless I adjust my expectation of what I will be confronted by in the mirror, I'm almost guaranteed to always be disappointed with myself.

And part of the bad skin issues, society aside, is really constantly feeling that disappointment when you look in the mirror. Like, ugh, another bad skin day. The more you can start to appreciate your body for what it is rather than what you want it to be, the more you can stave off that feeling like your body has somehow betrayed you.

Because let's be honest, even if your skin magically does get perfect, you're inevitably going to start showing signs of visible aging, which is its own can of psychological and emotional and even financial worms. My personal affirmation around my adult acne is that I'm still bad-ass, even with adult acne. I'm workshopping it.

The copy is not great, but it helps me. Number six is that office job you idolized is probably pretty dull. So most of us probably went through the first 22 years or more of our life with a pretty singular focus on getting the most prestigious job possible.

And as a result, we have fairly narrow definitions of what a 'real' job is. And that term 'real job' is probably one of my biggest pet peeves. Because not only is it really inaccurate, because the image of sitting behind a desk all day does not encompass many of the most important jobs in society.

It's also extremely depressing when you consider that we all have to work a job of some kind. And to add onto it the idea that you might go through life feeling that your job isn't 'real', despite really paying you a paycheck, is just so unnecessary. But this obsessive focus around landing a 'real' job is made even worse by how difficult just getting into that job can be.

More than 40% of college graduates take positions out of school that don't require a degree, and more than one in five college grads still aren't working a degree-demanding job a decade after leaving school. And that competitiveness and scarcity in the 'real' job market leads us not even to think through whether or not a job is right for us or what it will really entail in the long term. We just want to get a seat and not be the only college grad left standing when the musical chairs music stops.

But OK, let's say you do land that job in your field. The one that you really coveted and which felt so prestigious when you were going through school. The one that your parents were so psyched about.

Now you have to deal with being in the increasingly hostile American workforce. In America, the average workweek has increased since the 1970s, but leisure time has decreased by up to 37%. American workers forfeited nearly 50% of their paid vacation in 2017, and nearly 10% take no vacation days at all.

And studies show that the majority of Americans-- 52.3%-- are unhappy at work, and 26% of workers said that they were often or very often burned out or stressed out by their work. All of this to say that the more pressure we put on those jobs, even those 'real' prestigious jobs, to be our primary source of validation and socialization and self-identity, the more unhappy we're likely to be. But that's what we were taught, in so many cases, when we were desperately hunting for that right job.

That we should be willing to do anything for it. And that's just not true. Even the most fulfilling jobs shouldn't take over our lives, but considering that most of them are probably not going to be overly fulfilling, we have to be really clear about setting boundaries.

Even doing things as simple as not checking email after a certain time at night can be a really good way to reclaim some of that mental space and diversify where you're getting your self-identity from. Now all of this does not mean you are inevitably going to be miserable at work. As I said, even just creating boundaries around things like email can be a great start.

But there are also really good and concrete ways to combat stress and depression at work. Yes, even in those jobs you were so excited to land. We've linked to some articles in the description that will help you better communicate with your employer, decide what's important to you, and set those important boundaries at work.

But the more we understand why people tend to not like their jobs, the more we can steel ourselves against falling into a lot of the same traps. And more generally, the more we realize what it means to be 30, aka, not that scary at all, the more we can de-spook the experience and prepare ourselves for what should be an amazing time of life where we are leaving behind the insecurities of, maybe, not having everything quite figured out, and entering into a place where we can decide what we want for ourselves. I, personally, am extremely excited to turn 30.

I feel like I've been 30 for a long time now, and I'm still not even technically 30 yet. But more importantly, while I do not have any of the things that, maybe, my parents had at this age, like a home that I own or cars or kids, I am very, very happy with who and what I am. And on this spookiest of weeks, I wish you the same for yourself and for your 30th birthday.

But one way you can make any 30th birthday a little less scary is by knowing that you've started making your money work for you. And Wealthsimple is the perfect place to help do that. As always, guys, thank you for watching.

And don't forget to hit the Subscribe button and to come back every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday for new and awesome videos. Bye. [MUSIC PLAYING]