Achieving A Comfortable Retirement
BOSTON (CBS) - Planning for your retirement should begin with you first job. A study by Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies found that over 50% (54) of women did not have a retirement savings strategy. 38% had a plan but it was not written down and only about 7% of women had a written plan. For sure, many of these women will be scrambling in later life to figure it out.
Unless you want to live with one of your kids in your old age you really need to do some planning.
And if you choose not to do a financial plan come Thanksgiving, as you have your family sitting around the dinner table, decide which one of the kids you want to live with and be nice to that kid! Educate them and hope they will want you to live with them. And when they get married be really good to their spouses!
Women need to take charge of their finances. Need I say more? None of us want to be Bag Ladies! Nor do we want to live with our children. As grown-ups, all of our decisions have a financial component to them. Money is a powerful tool. Learn to use it.
Learn about money: how to make it, save it, invest it, keep it, protect it and pass it along to the next generation.
- Take charge of your finances, and if coupled, you need to share in managing the family's finances and making the financial decisions.
- Save for retirement with your first job; key years for retirement savings are those years between 22-35.
- Realize that Prince Charming is not coming to rescue you and if he does arrive, he may be on a mule with a mortgage and joint custody of his little princess.
- Figure out where your money goes each month. Do you have more month than money?
- Understand how and where you spend your money.
- Get out of debt. This may mean drastic measures such as "plastic surgery".
- Set up a spending plan. Budgeting is not fun but there are easy ways to save money.
- Make debt work for you to increase your net worth when you buy a home.
- Learn about investing to make your money grow faster than taxes and inflation.
- Learn how to use insurance to protect those hard earned assets and your dependents.
- Know where Social Security fits into your retirement planning.
- Learn about estate planning so that you can pass your assets to your heirs easily.
- Know what you don't know and go learn about it.
- Understand your money situation so you can better function as a wife, a divorcee, a widow, a mother, daughter, or a partner.
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You can hear Dee Lee's expert financial advice on WBZ NewsRadio 1030 each weekday at 1:55 p.m., 3:55 p.m., and 7:55 p.m.
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