When Should I Start Investing For Retirement

When You Start Early It'll Only Get Easier!

When should you start investing for retirement? The short answer is now! Here is what is important to get crystal clear about: what does your retirement look like?

Where will you live? What will you be doing on a daily basis? How much income will you need? Will you be traveling? Will you be healthy? What age do you want to retire? Who will you be supporting?

You have to see it as if you are already there, you have to smell it and feel it like you are already living that on a daily basis.

Take a piece of paper and start writing down all the things you would like to be doing, where you would like to live, vacations you enjoyed, hobbies, past times, people you like hanging around with and activities you might be doing with those people.

As another exercise, create an effective and detailed 10-year plan based on relationships will be very helpful in understanding exactly what you need to be doing to prepare for this type of future. Once all of this is complete you will be able to look at different retirement vehicles you can leverage to achieve these goals.

The later you wait to start this retirement plan, the more you find yourself sacrificing later on in your life, and this is not about giving things up in life. It's about adding more value. Retirement is actually cheaper the earlier you start because it is all about putting the resources you earn and knowledge you gain to work.

Anything Is Possible With A Plan!

"Theodore Johnson worked for UPS and never made more than $14,000 a year and yet, in his old age, was worth more than $70 million. When he said he had no money to save, a friend told him that if he were taxed, the money would be taken out of his account and he’d never see it. So he created a tax for himself to make him wealthy. Even though he made little money, he took 20 percent of his money and it went straight into an investment account. Over more than five decades, that compounded to make him $70 million."

- Tony Robbins

Of course, this won't be the case for everyone but can show you a reason why you'd want to start right away. Understanding compounding efforts over time will help you a great deal when it comes to securing the future.

I think of it this way: no one is going to be taking care of you for retirement, and if you don't take care of it now you'll end up in a place in life where you can't even hold onto your dignity. I see the struggle of the world today and feel like we need to all take responsibility and work towards the solutions. If we solve these problems as a community, then we have more time to live a happy life. Don't overlook the power of planning and compounding effects. Put your money to work today and decide that you won't become a casualty of improper planning. Life is easy when you plan!

 

When Should I Start Investing For Retirement is available on www.marshallbarbour.com