Tips for a Healthy Retirement
Looking forward to retiring early and spending the rest of your days sailing around the world on a cruise ship? Here are some simple tips to get you started.
- Force yourself to save. Sign up for automatic deductions from your paycheck and/or checking account and have the money deposited into your retirement savings accounts without you ever seeing it or getting a chance to spend it.
- Avoid overspending. Credit cards are incredibly useful, but may have ruined more lives in modern America than anything else short of alcohol. A debit card can offer the same protections and cashback bonuses without letting you spend more than you make, and you can still keep a credit card locked up for emergencies.
- Be aggressive early, conservative later. When you’re young, you want to be looking to increase your money as quickly as possible; closer to retirement, it becomes more about wealth preservation. Female investors in particular tend to be insufficiently aggressive with their early investments, leading to insufficient savings later in life.
- Avoid debt. This ties back in to point number 2; the easiest way to screw up your retirement is to saddle yourself with debt that will take years (and a lot of money that should be going into your retirement funds) to pay off. If you can’t pay for it in cash, or at least pay it off by the end of the month, don’t buy it!
- Minimize debt. Although some people do, in fact, save up and buy houses and cars with cash, if you just can’t wait that long, seek out the lowest interest rates and shortest terms. A 15-year mortgage, for example, will give you higher monthly payments than a 30-year mortgage, but you’ll pay much less money overall due to both the lower interest rate and (more importantly) less time for the interest to accrue.
For more great tips on finance and investing, be sure to check out Twenties Retirement, the financial site for people who like to plan ahead.
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