It’s no secret that investing for retirement involves some level of uncertainty. Depending on your personality, that uncertainty may deter you from taking risk, or it may entice you to go big and chase a larger potential return.
When you’re early in your career, much of financial advice focuses on the essentials — budgeting, saving, retirement contributions — but what a lot of people neglect is what would happen to those assets in case of an early or unexpected loss of life. It’s not a fun topic, but, especially once you’ve started a family, it becomes really important.
The dream of retiring early is a hot topic among millennials. There are countless podcasts, blog posts, and Reddit threads dedicated to exploring ways to achieve financial independence and gain more control over your time.
We say it all the time: You want to start thinking about your financial future as early as possible. But it can be difficult in your 20s, as you’re getting out of school, finding a job, and transitioning to being out on your own. It’s easy to set aside those early years when it comes to saving and investing, and, if that describes you, I completely understand.
If you’ve been following our team for a while, you know that we talk a lot about what you can do to work toward financial freedom. Today I want to switch gears and look at what might be holding you back from that goal.
One of the great things about my job is that I get to walk with clients through some of the biggest milestones of their lives, whether it’s getting married, having children, or retiring. We’re not just celebrating these achievements — we’re using the opportunities to dig in to how they affect the person’s finances and to help set them up for success moving forward.
Just as important as tidying up your home is taking a closer look at your finances. We’re between the rush of the holidays and the excitement of summer break, so now is the perfect time to make sure your money is doing its job in those hard-to-reach places.
Unless you’re one of those “wrapped and done by December one” people, you probably have some names left uncrossed on this year’s Christmas list. If that’s the case, I want to take a minute to suggest that you give the most boring gift of all.
Building, maintaining, and sticking to a budget can be a tough task for many of us with regular, full-time jobs. But it gets a lot more difficult if you don’t have a regular income, like those in sales-based jobs, seasonal workers, or folks who work in the gig economy. If you fall into one of these categories — as more and more young earners do — it’s especially important to budget wisely to have a plan for those months when the checks don’t come in quite as high as usual.
How investing a little can lead to much more.
You may remember learning about erosion in school, how a small trickle of water, over time, can wear away rocks and soil and transform into a raging river.
That image always enters my mind when I talk with young investors about how to make their money work for them early in their careers. Coming into their first jobs out of college, they probably aren’t making much income, and that’s while they’re considering student loans, saving for a first down payment on a home, and the other expenses that come from starting life on their own. Many of them feel that there just isn’t enough left over to start funding an investment account in a meaningful way.
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