Monday, November 18, 2013

Retiring Wealthy

How to retire very wealthy ...

The answer is to start young, as early as 14 or 15. Get a summer job and start investing the money. If you start young and remain disciplined, you will have 10-20 times more money at retirement age than if you wait until you are 40 to begin investing (and you'd have way more money than Uncle Sam will give you in Social Security). That's the difference between retiring with 75k in your IRA and retiring a millionaire. Then when you're at retirement age you can live comfortably off the interest while leaving a nice nest egg for your kids. The beauty is anybody (and I really mean anybody, regardless of income level) can do this who has the right mind-set and discipline level.

Why we don't teach the miracle of compounding interest to kids in school is beyond me (in addition to other aspects regarding money). There should be a course all about money, and students should be required to take it just like algebra, and I'm not talking about an esoteric economics or finance class where they teach BS theory. This would be a "get your hands dirty" course about how to manage money, how to balance a checkbook, what kind of retirement accounts are there, how the financial markets work, how to buy shares of stock, how to start a business, and so on.

If you're 40+, it's never too late to start investing, but at least try to get your kids or your grandkids to start today.

No comments:

Post a Comment