I am participating in my first carnival this week (Carnival of Personal Finance) hosted at Personal Finance Advice. I submitted “Reasons you should not save for retirement” article to the carnival, while it pails in comparison to the quality of the other articles in the carnival, I felt it was one of the better articles I have written so far (I actually proofread it after I wrote it). Anyway you check out the carnival here.
How many years do you have till retirement? Thinking about putting off saving for retirement just one more year? Well check out the chart below to see what it will cost you.
When it comes to saving for retirement most people are pretty good at coming up with excuses as to why they can’t save for retirement right now. There’s the mortgage, the cost of raising kids, just not getting paid enough at work, need a new car, need to remodel the house, putting it off until they are older, don’t know how to invest, the stock market stinks right now, need to pay off the credit cards, really want to a buy a new (fill in the blank) first. I’ll admit it saving for retirement is not that easy. Especially if you haven’t been in the habit of saving before. It’s kind of like trying to get to the gym and exercise to lose those extra 20lbs you put on. There never seems to be enough time to get around to it and in the beginning it can be pretty overwhelming and you are likely to be fairly unsuccessful starting out so most people either never start or quit shortly after.
Well our HR department sent out the form that allows us to modify our contribution percentage for the upcoming quarter. I went ahead and bumped up my percentage from 14% to 17.5%. This increase is a direct result of the planning I did in this post.
As you may know I decided earlier this month to set a goal for myself to save $100,000 in principal by the time I am 30. This is a pretty ambitious goal seeing as I have less than 4 years before the goal is suppose to be met and am not even a third of the way there.
Seeing as how I solidified my $100,000 by Age 30 Goal and seeing as how the goal is based simply on contributions alone, I think I will release a separate post each month detailing the process on that goal as the numbers will be different than Net Worth Report. I’m also contemplating changing the name of my “Net Worth Report” to “Retirement Nest Egg Report” as I think that better describes what I am tracking.