re: Advice for a 20 year old - warning tl;dr

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Save / invest 15% of your income.
Avoid having payments on vehicles.

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Fair warning, it might be tough to get by on 85% of your income as a college student part-timer. If you make 20k and invest 15% of that, you've got 17k before taxes; after taxes (assuming your investments are tax deductible, like a traditional IRA or 401k), somewhere around 15k. Comes out to about 1275/mo. Rent, utilities, cell phone, gas, food, incidentals, etc will eat that amount away if you aren't especially frugal.

Financing a vehicle isn't the worst thing that you can do if you can get a nice enough rate and keep it reasonable. Probably not conditions that can be taken for granted if you're a college student, but it's not a bad bet to invest the amount you've financed assuming you have the cash on hand to pay for it in full and you can secure a low fixed rate.