Retirement Planning in Your Thirties - A Great Time to Increase Your Retirement

Copied and Pasted by Daniel Powell

If you’ve been hoping that saving would be easier by now, yet haven’t begun to save for retirement by your thirties, time is now critical. Every year you delay now may affect not only when you’re able to retire, but also what your retirement will look like. If you haven’t yet created an IRA, do so. If you haven’t yet participated in a 401K, now is the time to begin.

If you have contributed to an IRA, can you contribute more this year? Can you make your contribution earlier in the year to take maximum advantage of the tax-deferral benefits? If you’ve been participating in your 401K plan, ensure that you’re aware of your vesting schedule before you leave your current job. Leaving without taking your employer matching contribution could mean the forfeiture of thousands of retirement planning dollars.

Given you’re twenty or more years until retirement, you’ve got a very long-term time horizon for investing. This means that bulk of your retirement money should be invested in stocks (or mutual funds or ETFs that are invested in stocks). Despite the increased risk that is associated with stock market investing, stocks offer the greatest long term potential for your money. With over twenty years to ride out the expected fluctuations, you can benefit from the higher expected returns. Keeping all your money in the bank leaves you with another risk: one that the purchasing power of your money will not keep up with inflation, let alone grow enough for you to retire comfortably.

This article is not geared as much towards students, but to people who have reached thirty and really need to start planning for retirement. Overall, it stressed the importance of retiring and to invest while your young! The link to the original article is below and at the bottom of that page are many other interesting articles. Enjoy!

Retirement Planning In Your Thirties – A Great Time to Increase Your Retirement