Why is retirement planning important in your 30s?

You want more stability.

As you get older you want more stability. You don’t want to take as many risks with your money and time. At this point you likely know what you want out of life and you go for it. You want stability. You want to know that you have retirement in sight at some point. You don’t want feel that you’re stuck in some vicious cycle forever.

You’ve made up your mind on real estate.

Most of my friends in their 30s have made up their minds on real estate. They’ve decided if they want to rent or own at this point. Those that want to own, are in the process of buying a home or already have that own. Those that rent, are happy with their situation and the flexibility that renting offers them.

Once you make up your mind on your living situation, you can then determine how much money you want to put towards your retirement. With rent or a mortgage, you can budget how much of your income goes towards bills, savings, and retirement. This is important because you can see where you stand with your retirement plans.

You want a career with growth potential.

Retirement planning should be taken into account when it comes to career choice because you want to find a job where you have the opportunity to maximize your retirement contributions. In your 30s you’re going to want to amp up you career situation, your retirement savings, and your plans overall. My friends all tell me that by this point you want to be making more money and saving more for retirement.

That’s why you should take retirement planning seriously in your 30s. Not to say that you should get more serious in your 30s than your 20s or your 40s.

What retirement moves have you been making in your 30s?

“Social network site Facebook has set a price range for an initial public offering (IPO) of stock that values the company at between $85bn and $95 billion.” — BBC UK

With stats like that it’s tempting to want to jump on board with some startup company in hopes of making it big. You can find yourself a conservative job where you save for your retirement in the future or you can go all in and jump on board with a young, ambitious startup company.

When it comes to saving for retirement, we need to take a deep look at our careers. The job that we choose to work in our 20s will dictate what we do with our retirement planning. If you take the chance of working with a company that doesn’t have a predictable future, you might have to hold off on the huge investments into your retirement. On the other hand, you can land a stable job where you have a clear cut plan for your retirement figured out.

Should you work for a startup company when saving for retirement? 

Personal finance and retirement planning all come down to your personal goals. Some of us want to take on the world and not even worry about money. There are others that want to earn a honest living.

“You cannot create a piece of art merely for money. Doing it as part of commerce so denudes art of wonder that it ceases to be art.”  – Seth Godin

Do you want a safe job? Do you want to take some risks in your 20s?

I can’t answer any of these questions for you. I have friends that fall on both sides of the equation here. My friend James took a steady full-time job in his late-20s because he wanted to be able to budget and start planning for his retirement. Then my buddy Alex on the flip side, he’s more concerned with working on his own business, and he rarely even thinks about retiring let alone saving for retirement.

What retirement planning comes down to in my opinion is the moves that you want to make in your 20s. You can decide to take major risks and work on your own projects. You can also decide to find a safe job where you can plan for your retirement without any stress. I can’t tell you what to do. I just want you to be aware of your choices.

What if you can’t start your career? What if you don’t have a sufficient amount of income coming in?

I just read that college graduates are struggling to find work over at USA Today. While this isn’t a secret since we all know that it’s not easy to find work right out of college, it’s always scary to see a well-researched article on the topic.

What scared me the most about this article when it comes to retirement savings and income in your 20s is the following excerpt:

“Young adults with bachelor’s degrees are increasingly scraping by in lower-wage jobs — waiter or waitress, bartender, retail clerk or receptionist, for example — and that’s confounding their hopes a degree would pay off despite higher tuition and mounting student loans.”

The reality here is that many of the 20-somethings reading this are struggling to find work after college in their respective fields. This means that you can’t start your career. This means that you have to hold off saving for retirement.

I wanted to provide you with one solution here when it comes to retirement savings and difficulty with starting your career.

What can you do if you can’t start your career, but what to save for retirement?

You need to think about the long term. Sure compound interest is great and it makes sense to start earlier. However, you need to do whatever it takes to land yourself a job (career) in your field. This should be priority number one. Once you start working in the field then you can begin to worry about retirement savings and other financial goals.

How much should you spend on starting your career? I believe that you should spend all of your time and money on trying to get into your field in your 20s. The reason for this is that the sooner you start moving your way up the ranks, the sooner that you can save for retirement and take advantage of opportunities that are offered by your company when it comes to retirement.

It sucks that you can’t find your dream career right out of college, but you need to deal with what’s thrown at you. You’ll eventually find the job that you want. The goal is to find this job sooner so that you can start saving for retirement sooner.

You’re also likely earning money for the first time ever. You have a steady income coming in. You’re earning a fraction of what you’ll be making in the future. You’re excited to at least have some money coming in. You start getting a few paychecks. You’re just unsure of what to do with your income.

Where am I going with this piece?

You should start saving money as soon as the opportunity arises. This post is a shout out to all 20-somethings that are finally generating some income for the first time. I just want you to remember that it’s never too early to start taking personal fiancee seriously. It’s never too early to start saving for your retirement.

Before you run away, allow me to do some convincing first.

Why should you start saving up for retirement so early on with your first apprenticeship?

I wanted to highlight why I personally chose to open up a retirement account when I was just 18 years old and not even old enough to drink alcohol:

• Have compound interest on your side.
• A tangible goal.
• Retire early.
• Less stress in your older years.
• Build a solid portfolio.
• Have a backup plan.

Will you start saving for retirement early? I hope that the points mentioned here have convinced you.

How can you save for retirement with your first source of income?

Saving for retirement is sort of scary. You don’t know where to go or how to start because none of your friends have gone through this process yet. It comes off as pretty intimidating. What do you do?

All you have to do is make an appointment at your local bank. You walk in, fill out a few forms, chat a bit, and you can have your retirement account opened in a few minutes. It’s really that simple.

You can check out apprenticeships UK for more details on actually landing that apprenticeship that you’ve been thinking about going for. Once you find an apprenticeship or come close to it, you can consider looking into your retirement. As this blog suggest, do not wait, my friend.

How can you keep your retirement planning simple? How can you retire without the stress?

Focus on paying yourself first.

The first step in saving for retirement is to pay yourself first. This means that you need to take care of your retirement savings before you do anything else. The money that you have left over can be used for whatever else comes to mind. First you need to keep it simple and put that money away for your golden years.

Cut out the crap.

To keep things simple and to get serious about retirement, you’ve got to cut the crap out. This is all of the excess spending that you do that brings in no value to your life. Once you cut out the crap, you can live simple and save more for retirement.

What’s considered crap?

• Expensive sunglasses.
• Eating out every single meal.
• Random non-essentials.
• And so on…

Are you ready to get rid of the crap?

Make wise investments.

You need to make wise investments. I know that this is obvious, but you know what I mean. If you have plenty of time left until retirement you can take some risks. If your retirement is coming up, you need to be a little more conservative.

Wait it out.

You got to wait it out because you likely have many years or decades left until you can retire. If you want to sell a stock because it’s down, you should consider waiting. If you want to jump on the next hot investment, you should also wait because it could go bust in a few months.

There’s nothing wrong with waiting. It’s your money. It’s your retirement.

Keep on saving.

To keep retirement simple you need to keep on saving. This means that you have to save a little off every paycheck, regardless of what else is going on in your life. The goal is to turn retirement planning into a habit and something that you do on a consistent basis.

That’s how you can use simplicity to save money for your retirement years. You don’t have to get carried away. It doesn’t take that much to plan for your retirement. Keeping things simple is often the best solution.

Why should you get extreme about your retirement planning?

• Retire earlier.
• Retire when you’re still young,
• Travel more in your retirement years.
• Spend time with family (kids, spouse, grandkids).

Are those reasons enough to get hardcore about retirement? Before you get too excited, we need to look at the other side here.

What are the setbacks with extreme retirement planning?

1. You miss out on today.
2. You’re not guaranteed to live to a certain again.
3. You don’t enjoy the journey.

As you can tell, there are both setbacks and benefits to becoming hardcore with retirement planning.

How can you start becoming more hardcore with your retirement?

Work long hours.

If you want to beef up those retirement accounts, you’re going to have to increase the amount of work that you do. You can pick up over time at your current job, start a side business, work a part-time gig, or find extra ways to make money randomly. Regardless of what you do, the point is to work more so that you have more money coming in.

Cut out the non-essentials.

Now it’s time for you to cut out what you don’t really need. If you want to retire early you should really embrace minimalism. This is going to suck for most of you reading this. The reality is that you’re going to have to cut out a lot of crap here. You already know what you need to cut and this is a quick overview. I’ll leave the cutting back to you.

No more trips.

You can save the trips for your retirement years. For now, you’re going to have to cut back on trips, save more money, and focus on making more money. You might not like this one, but it’s part of the process.

Save as much as possible of your income.

The final step is to save as much of your income as you can. This process is simple, pay yourself first, and cut back on what you don’t need. Then you can take these savings and do whatever you want to with them. You can invest, save in a regular account, buy property, or look into other options. The key is that you save as much money as you humanly can if you want that early retirement.

That’s how you can get extreme about your retirement in a quick overview. The choice is yours. Do you want to retire quicker? Are you willing to sacrifice your lifestyle today to plan for tomorrow? That’s for you to decide.

This is what an old buddy asked me the other day. This friend now works in a bank and he deals with retirement accounts. He helps manage money for his clients that have diverse goals with their retirement plans. We got into a discussion about managing retirement money. I left wondering if I should really be managing my own retirement accounts.

I wanted to look at the idea of managing your retirement accounts. I’ll present both sides to this argument and then you can make your own decision as to what you want to do with your savings.

Why should you manage your own retirement accounts?

It’s your money.

Nobody will ever care about your money as much as you do. Why? Because you worked so hard and long to accumulate it. You know what it takes for you to earn and then save money. This is why you can best manage your own money (retirement or general investments).

You know your level of risk tolerance.

You can tell your account manager that you can handle risk. The truth is that only you truly know how much risk you can handle. You may feel that you have a high level of risk tolerance until you see those stocks plummet and you instantly panic. By knowing your level of risk tolerance, you can make your own investments accordingly.

While in some cases it makes sense to manage your own retirement accounts, it’s not always the best option. Why should you NOT manage your own retirement money?

You want an objective opinion.

It’s difficult to be realistic. It’s even more challenging to be objective with your own money. It’s easy to get emotional and attached to certain investments. This is why it helps to obtain an objective opinion, an outside that’s not emotionally connected to anything. You don’t want to screw up your retirement income because you got too emotional about a poor investment.

You don’t have time.

Life can get pretty busy at times. If you have a full-time job, family, side commitments, and hobbies, then the last thing on your mind is going to be your retirement planning. You obviously want to retire one day. You just don’t want to spend your working years thinking about your retirement. This is when it makes sense to outsource your retirement planning. Your financial planner can take care of your finances while you focus on doing what you love to do in life.

As you can see, there are many options for your retirement savings. What you choose to do will depend on the type of investor that you are and how hands-on you want to be with your own money. Some of you reading this will want to be active with your finances. Others will want to enjoy life and have someone else worry about the money management side of things.

Who will manage your retirement accounts? Will you manage your own money?

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Many people find it difficult to hold onto their cash, so why not add this calculator to your site today? Simply click on the ‘add this calculator to your site’ link at the bottom and paste the code where you want it to appear. It’s as simple as that and will make your slice of the web more interactive in seconds.




A ISA allows you to save tax free. This is because you pay no tax on the interest you earn.

This post is apart of the Roth IRA movement.

The goal of this movement is to promote the Roth IRA. Since there’s only so many words that I can use to describe this investment vehicle, I wanted to go into a different direction with this article.

I’ll leave the main description of the Roth IRA to the man spearheading this movement:

“With a Roth IRA, your contribution is made after taxes are taken out of your income. However, the money in a Roth IRA grows tax-free.” — Jeff Rose

Now that you understand the main benefit to starting an Roth IRA, what can you do to actually start saving for your retirement? I figured that everyone in this series would praise the investment tool and promote it. I want to do that as well. I just realize that there are many readers that simply don’t have the finances to plan for retirement. Many readers are stuck in debt because of their credit cards and that payday loan.

I wanted to write about how the biggest setback of living paycheck to paycheck is that you can’t save for your retirement. When you’re struggling just to catch up or stay afloat, you’re missing out on valuable time and money that could be invested into your future. When you don’t invest in your future, you don’t have much to look forward to.

This is just a reminder for anyone reading this about the negatives of living pay day to pay day, not saving for retirement, and what can go wrong when you put everything on your credit card. You know what you’re doing is wrong. I can’t preach to you. This is just a friendly reminder that there’s more to life. I want to open your eyes and help you get out of your rut.

Why should you even bother saving for retirement at an early age? Two words- compound interest. With compound interest and time on your side, you can save some serious money for your retirement. The main benefit of compound interest is that you can save more for retirement and possible retire earlier. Do you really want to be working into your late-60s? I don’t think so.

The good news is that you can get out of your rut. You can stop living paycheck to paycheck. You can start saving for retirement. You can get to where you want to be. You don’t have to be in the paycheck to paycheck rut forever. You just need a little encouragement and a daily dose of reality. You have the power to take control of your situation and plan for your eventual retirement.

Will you join in on the Roth IRA movement?

“You know, it was uncomfortable doing the same thing. I don’t like a rut.” — Ruben Blades

The riding around through the countryside was very exhilarating. The terrain was bumpy and the scenery was beautiful. Then near the end of the journey, we stopped off by a little shop. As soon as our group started to roll in, the kids started to jump for joy. The kids all ran toward us. The kids started washing us, holding our hands, and begging for money. It was a sad sight to say the least. Some of the kids didn’t even have underwear on.

One little girl even chased after the pickup truck they had us on to beg for money. I’m not sure how quick the driver was going, but she pretty much kept up. One of the other passengers actually caught this on video and it looks even more impressive when you watch it again.

This got me thinking about money and living conditions. There are people in this world that are begging for money. There are those that don’t have access to resources that could improve their quality of life. There are people suffering and begging for change just to eat. Retirement planning is not even an option for them.

This leads me to the question—do you appreciate what you have?

My answer is no. I don’t feel that I genuinely appreciate all of the things that I own and have accomplished in the past few years. I always want more. I’m never satisfied with what I have. You can’t plan for retirement if you always want more. Retirement should be about less crap and more of enjoying yourself.

I realize that I need to appreciate what I have. I’ve been blessed with great health and the ability to access the best resources out there. The only reason that I’m not a millionaire is because of myself. I have everything that I could ask for.

I’ve never had to beg for money, work, food, or a date. If you’ve never had to beg for anything then you have it better than many people living on this same planet as us.

Do you appreciate what you have in your life? When you start to appreciate what you have and what you have access to, you can then start to focus on truly saving for retirement. You’ll know what you need more of in your life (happiness) and what you need less of (consumerism). It’s much easier to retire when you don’t have massive amounts of credit card debt, a huge mortgage, and no savings because you weren’t able to appreciate the blessings that came your way.