Let’s be honest, most financial planning Tips are to complex or too trite to be of much use to the average consumer. Most are tips we’ve heard before over and over again and the rest is made for Type ‘A’ people who tend to alphabetize and color-code their sock drawers. Not exactly advice that the average person can use, unfortunately.
The Tips here today are given with the assumption that you’re already contributing regularly to your 401 (k), already paying off your credit cards and mortgage ahead of time and brushing 3 times a day. (You are, aren’t you?) With this in mind here are three excellent Tips that you can actually use to help your financial plans prosper in 2013. We hope you like them and we urge you to put them to good use.
First a question; do you have an idea about what you’ll need to have saved for retirement? If not you’re not alone. Fewer than 45% of all Americans have ever even tried to figure it out and even fewer still have the money, or are on track to have it, by the time they retire. Heck, 30% of us have less than $1000.00 saved!
That’s why, if nothing else, you need to start saving for retirement NOW, not later. Saving for retirement should be your biggest savings goal for 2013 and you should pore as much energy, and as much money, into your retirement accounts that you possibly can. Use the Social Security Admin’s retirement estimator if you need to and you’ll see why this is so vitally important.
Another Tip is to ramp up your investments in 2013. If you don’t already have one a Roth individual retirement account is something that you and your spouse can invest $5500.00 each into this year and, if you’re over 50, you can both add $1000.00 to that total. That’s 12 grand right there that could be put aside for later. Funds and emerging markets are both safe and offer great returns so take a look at them also by all means.
Make 1 month this year a month that you don’t eat out anywhere for any meal. The savings on this can be huge and of course should all be funneled into your savings or retirement accounts. The fact is, homemade food is much healthier and cheaper than restaurant food by far and taking food from home all the time could save you hundreds of dollars. Plus cooking can be a lot of fun, especially together.
We hope these Tips were helpful and we invite you back for more here on our Blog very soon. Good luck.