Retirement. Retirement savings. Retirement planning. Retirement dreams.
When I retire, I’m going to do this…
When I retire, I’ll have time for this…
When I retire, I will finally be living…
My question…how?
First of all, don’t live for tomorrow, live for today. I wrote a blog with that philosophy in mind. Check it out here. Plan for tomorrow, but live for today.
Second, what are you doing to accomplish all your retirement dreams? It’s so instantly gratifying to go out to dinner, movies and shopping. That money that we’re spending on that is the money that could be growing and let us do so much more with it later.
I’m not an expert. Let me repeat, I’m not really even an amateur. I’m simply someone that STRONGLY believes in compound interest.
My Forever and I are self-employed. We have no options for work-related retirement savings. No match from our employers so that means it’s all on us.
These are the top things that I think will get you to your retirement goals. At the very least, this is exactly what we are doing and are impressed with what we’re seeing.
Find a Financial Planner
Matt had a SEP IRA before we got married that he had started. (Thanks, I think, to some parental nudging.) I met the planner he had it through a couple times and never walked away from our meetings feeling confident. I walked away feeling very, very stupid.
Honestly, you can invest your money yourself and do just as well as an expert and not have to pay somebody. But it’s something that My Forever and I agree on. I don’t want to do it. He doesn’t want to do it. But we both want the benefit of having money invested. So we hire somebody. We found somebody that we both feel comfortable and confident in.
Ladies, I want to speak just a moment just to you. Our guy calls and emails ME. I’m the one that is the primary contact for him. I’m the one that found and researched. I’m the one that asks 99.5% of the questions. I’m the one that follows how well (or bad) we’re doing in the market.
This is not 1950 where the husband is in charge and you don’t get to know what’s going on with your money. The guy that Matt had been going to made me feel that way. Maybe it’s because I was a new wife and Matt was the one that had been doing the investing. That guy made me feel like I didn’t deserve to know what was going on and all my questions were stupid. Well, this new wife (with a discussion with her husband) pulled the money out and went somewhere else where I was valued.
Where to invest retirement?
If you get a match at work, go for it! As I’ve already mentioned, we don’t. We invest the max in our Roth IRAs every year.
We have two options for retirement at this point.
- Income from the land that we purchase.
- Retirement savings that we put in.
Matt started with the SEP which is pre-tax dollars. That means we get a break on our taxes now, but will pay the tax rate we’re at when it comes out. We switched to the Roth’s because it’s post-tax dollars. We are paying the taxes on that money now, in our hopefully much lower tax bracket than we will be at when retirement comes. It grows tax free that way. Again, we’re not professionals. Go talk to one if you have questions.
We invest in mutual funds. We follow a Dave Ramsey approach, making it fit for us. I had to learn what a mutual fund was. I had to learn what the different share types were. I had to learn how we were paying our guy. I had to learn a bunch of things that I didn’t want to.
Until my mom accepts the fact that I know longer want to adult and move back into my childhood room and not work or pay any bills, this is the things that I get to do. I get to learn about mutual funds. I get to follow the market. I get to squeeze enough money out of our lives to put into a fund that I can’t touch for a really long time. I get to watch the amazing affects of compound interest. I get to plan for tomorrow while living for today.
Adulting is hard. Adulting looks like so much fun, until you’re here. There are so many things. My Forever and I value the importance of saving for retirement. So we put in the work so we will be able to do all the things in retirement.
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