You will retire one day, face that fact. Resigning to be a greeter at Wal-mart demanding senior citizen discounts for everything is not a great retirement plan. I’m sure you want get your shuffle board on in Miami or if your more ambitious, parlay on the beaches of Brazil. Well, if you’re young, now’s the time to start. By the time you hit 65, you should have $25 bucks stored away for each buck you plan on spending in retirement. Sounds like a tough challenge, huh? But its not- its actually easy to get started.


If your company offers 401K plans, by all means, utilize it!!! Your money will automatically be withdrawn and you wont have to deal with the hassles of making the deposits yourself or be tempted to spend that money on a new BCBG dress (oopsI'm guilty of that) or some new Air one's from Greenbriar mall. And if your company matches, that’s more dollar dollar bills ya’ll…. Once you’ve signed up, elect to utilize the target retirement fund to put your financial management on autopilot. All you have to do pick out the year you plan to leave the rat race behind and your "dollar dollar bills, ya'll" will automatically allocate themselves to mutual funds that optimize your risk level. If you are younger, you can tolerate a little more turbulent stocks which in return gives you better gains on your investment. Why investment in riskier stocks you ask? Because the younger you are, the greater the length of time you have to bounce back from the bad days that occur naturally in the market.


Putting money in the 401k is the best way to retire with handsome rewards so max it out (there are limitations to how much is contributed each year, but the amount has recently gone to adjust for the increasing price of money aka inflation). If you max out, then put it in a Roth IRA, if you max out there, then the traditional IRA is next. Just save save save!

So get started and plan for your future. Its simple and its easy so there’s no excuse…unless you don’t have a job and that’s a different story. But please, plan to accumulate wealth, not bling and cars. You know social security will not secure our future generations because there will be more people(the baby-boomers) sucking the funds dry than there will people working to replace the funds(us), so don’t leave the future up to governmental policies….put your future in your hands and start saving today!

Source(CNN Money, my education)

Next installment……Disaster proof your finances.


This post was marinated to the music of:

C.R.E.A.M. - Wu Tang Clan

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Labels: finance