Let’s be clear: I could care less about retirement.

With my rugged good looks and incredible personality, why would anyone want me to quit working with them? I’d much prefer to do what I love (writing here once a month) until I die.

BUT that doesn’t mean that I’m saying bye-bye to financial independence. If I decide to tell the overlords here at ADP to shove it, I want the ability to push that big red button tomorrow.

That’s why I choose to “afford” a retirement fund.

I’ve been told over and over during my career that people can’t “afford” to put money toward retirement. There are bills today, child expenses, work-related costs…fires that need to be put out right flippin’ now. A retirement account will have to wait, they say.

But affording retirement is easy if you examine your priorities. Instead of dreaming about that shiny new thing or even that “I have to have this for my job” thing, you have to instead want financial independence even more. As my friend LaTisha Styles at YoungFinances mentioned on our Stacking Benjamins podcast, you have to realize that shopping today doesn’t help as much as saving for tomorrow.

A cool side note: once you start saving, whether you think you have a saving “gene” or not, you’ll find yourself rolling faster and faster as the successes start piling up.

If you want to start saving into a retirement account, here’s what you do:

1) Focus on why. Most people in America (and elsewhere, for that matter) work in jobs they don’t like doing things they’d rather not do. Why stay there a day longer than you have to? Instead, plan out what your ideal day would look like if you didn’t have to go to work. Realize, that the idea of “doing nothing” might sound awesome right now, but that’s not a recipe for longevity. On our Stacking Benjamins Short Stack podcast, we shared a story about a researcher at UCLA who discovered Catholic Nuns live longer than most of us because they have important work to do….forever.

2) Compare that long range goal with today’s purchases. That new shiny dongle for your office today probably seems awesome until you compare it with that trip around the world later. Flip through a few “dream” photos of your hoped-for Kenyan safari or Tuscan sunsets and you’ve fought half the battle. From there, you’ll find that you don’t want the dongle as much anymore.

Any time I get to use the word “dongle” in an article, it’s a little win.

3) Make it automatic, baby. A woman I’ve been working alongside on a project wrote me the other day about the power of a due date. I don’t know about you, but nothing forces me to pay bills more than their due date. If I turn my retirement savings into a bill, I’m far more likely to save than if I just tell myself that I’ll do it. Writing that check every month never happens.

Side note: People have told me over and over that “I don’t need to set up my savings on automatic pilot. I’ll remember jto write a check every month. In fact, they’d assure me that there wouldn’t ever be a problem with their way of savings. I can’t remember one instance where writing a check was ever a good strategy.

Still Can’t Afford A Retirement Account? Read On….

For most people, those three steps enough are enough to begin the saving wheel. But we all know someone who has bigger problems and is going to need to cut to finish the job.

Maybe that’s you. If so, I’ve been there.

For those people, my job was to help them wheel their budget into surgery and find new savings. Steal any of these biggies:

1) Phone/television packages – We reliably found money by restructuring phone and television/cable packages. This was an easy way to free up $50 to $100 per month.

2) Debt restructure. If someone has debt, we’d see if there were ways to create savings. Often, someone could refinance their home to a lower interest rate loan and also free up money to save today. If you refinance debt and don’t automatically save some of the money, you’re destined for more debt down the road.

3) Tax refund. If you’re going to waste your tax return on non-goal oriented activities, why not change your workplace withholding to automatically save into your 401k plan or an IRA? In some cases, my clients had tax returns of over $5,000. That’s a healthy Roth IRA contribution.

4) Meal plan. Be honest: maybe you eat meals at restaurants WAY more than you tell people you do. Otherwise, why are they packed throughout the day? Also, many North Americans are wasteful with groceries. By planning exactly what you’ll eat for each meal you can grab control of your costs fairly quickly and often free up significant money for retirement. A meal plan slashed over $300 per month off of our spending personally. I’ll bet it can do the same for you. (And, by the way….it’s fun to plan your weekly meals.)

5) Use utility plans. This one won’t save you as much money, but here’s how it works. Some people can’t save because their expenses fluctuate too much. A successful budget works because you can plan to shove more money into the savings bucket. By switching to a utility plan, your bill will stay level most months and then you’ll make up the difference or have a smaller bill once a year (or other interval….check with your area’s utilities for details).

On that note, examine all of your spending and see how much fluctuation you can remove. As you level out your spending, you’ll find the amount you can reliably save rises.

That’s it! Hopefully you’re on the retirement plan savings wagon.

How much should you save toward retirement? That’s a topic for another day! #keepthemwantingmore

Here’s where you can help: how do you save money? Let’s throw in some more ideas on how to “afford” retirement plans in the comments. Thanks!

Joe Saul-Sehy is the incredible talent behind StackingBenjamins.com and enjoys spending as much money on lattes as possible as he builds wealth.

When most people look for their largest chunk of debt, they see their mortgage. Now there are some differences in opinion on whether holding a mortgage is “acceptable” debt or not and how long you should keep making mortgage payments. But either way, most young first time homebuyers end up needed to get a mortgage to own a home.

It’s no secret the housing market has gone through a wild ride the past few years, and the mortgage industry has changed with it as well. When you think you are ready to buy your first home, many people simply are overwhelmed with the process because there are so many moving parts. Along with the uncertainty come a lot of mistakes that people make that prevent them from becoming a homeowner (or simply make the process take far too long!).

So how do you get off on the right foot and make the search for your first home an efficient and successful process? As my favorite childhood toy G.I. Joe would say, knowing is half the battle.

Check out the following infographic for a list of the top 12 first time homebuyer pitfalls so you can be ready for the journey ahead. Call your local mortgage broker with any questions you may have about your qualifications.


Created by First Commerce Financial.

If you work for a public company, you may have a worthwhile benefit called an Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP). These plans are offered to all employees just like healthcare or holiday pay is applied across the board, and it might be a very smart move to funnel some money into one. An ESPP allows employees to purchase the company’s public stock through payroll deductions (after taxes) and usually at a discount to the market price. The discount varies, but usually caps out at 15%. So here’s the main question: should you invest your hard-earned paycheck into your company’s stock?

You can answer that question by asking yourself the following:

• Do I know where the company is going? Do you understand the financial outlook of the company? Is it a mature company that is not likely to see a lot of growth? Is it a growing company that is expanding rapidly but still showing losses? Do you really understand the business? Because the last thing you want is for this thing to implode Enron-style.
• Do I believe the company’s stock is fairly priced? You may work for a great company, but what if you work for a really great company, the Googles and the Apples whose stock are closely followed, traded at high volumes, and perhaps overvalued due to all of the speculation and enthusiasm? Sometimes too much enthusiasm can backfire. On the other hand, before Marissa Meyer joined Yahoo! and the stock price climbed about 70%, Yahoo! shares were significantly undervalued, at one point trading for less per share than what the value of all of Y!’s cash assets were (including its Alibaba stake). But Yahoo! wasn’t sexy then, which is exactly when an employee purchasing stock at a discount to market could have been making a very good investment.
• Would I purchase stock on my own without the ESPP? Would you? Would you take the time to buy shares on your own, without the discount? Remember, just because it’s on sale doesn’t mean you have to buy it.
• Have you calculated the cost and benefit? For example, let’s say your company’s shares trade at $10/share. You set aside $1000 from your paycheck to purchase shares. On the open market, you would have received 100 shares, but thanks to your $8.50 share price, you can purchase 117 shares and have a few bucks left over to buy a Coffee Bean Ice Blended Hazelnut drink (or a margarita at happy hour). Or you can decided to just buy those original 100 shares for $850 instead of $1000. When it comes time to sell those shares, here’s an easy reference on how the proceeds get taxed.

ESPPs are a great way to start investing, especially if you understand your company and its prospects for growth. If you work for a blue chip company, the ESPP may simply be a nice way to invest in a solid stock at a discount to the market. There are usually not that many rules attached to when you can sell these shares since you are paying for them with your own payroll deductions, so maybe there are even some short-term opportunities to make money (but your company may not encourage that!).

Have you ever invested through an ESPP? Did you get really, really rich? Tell me about it!

The following is a guest post.

We’re prone to think that life insurance is incredibly difficult to obtain—especially if we’re jumping off buildings, engaging in gun battles, and ripping up the streets in uber hot cars—but it’s not. Anyone, in any high-risk profession, can be insured—the catch, is how much it’s going to cost them.

Now, in the case of James Bond, he’s good to go; he works for an agency that would suffer a major loss if something were to happen to him, so you can be sure that they have him insured on both the behalf of his loved ones—the Bond girls, I guess, or maybe his Aston Martin—and themselves. After all, they’d need to get right back out there and offer 008 an awesome salary:

“What happened to 007?”

“Oh, uh, nothing… he… uh, retired.”

“Where’d he retire?”

“Um. Some island. No one knows where it is.”

“Odd.”

“Yup. He’s an odd one! Here’s a paycheck… hey, how good are you at defying death at every turn?”

Unfortunately, not everyone is quite so good at the death-defying tactics, which is why life insurance companies give high-risk professions a wide birth. Visit Suncorp for a life insurance quote to suit your specific needs today.

What Does It Matter to the Insurer?

Well, it is called life insurance, so the life and well-being of the insurer is kind of the only thing that does matter. The longer they’re alive, the longer they’re paying premiums! You might be in the best shape of your life, but if you’re taming lions or tight-rope walking across the Grand Canyon for a living, the chances of you living long and prospering are pretty slim.

While those are outrageous examples, let me give you one that isn’t so outrageous and happens to be the deadliest profession in the United States. You ready for it?

Fishermen.

That’s right; according the U.S. Department of Labor, the most dangerous and hardest to insure profession in the United States puts that Atlantic Salmon on the dinner table on Saturday nights.

Where does the USBLS get such a statistic? This conclusion is derived from the number of reported fatalities on the job, or injuries on the job that later result in fatalities.

James Bond is cool and all, but he isn’t cruising through hurricanes just off the Grand Banks, in a fishing boat, just so that the mass public can dine on one of nature’s finest offerings.

How Does an Insurance Company Insure High-Risk Professions Then?

They charge way more for premiums. An insurance company is running a business and all businesses, in order to be classified as businesses, have to make a profit. Any business that doesn’t, typically isn’t a very good business, right? Right.

Insurers play the game, and it’s a risky game—who knows who will die, or why, or when—so the best thing that they can do is make educated investments and play the game close to the vest. They’re not going to risk that James Bond could be dead within the year, resulting in a meager collection of premiums when compared to the big payout. Unless, of course, Bond and the Bond Franchise are willing to pay higher premiums to help bridge the gap, should something happen to him.

Are There Any Affordable Options for People In High-Risk Occupations?

Typically, the most affordable option is going to be group life insurance through an employer; nearly everything else is going to get fairly pricey. However, if there’s anyone who can find the best deal, it’s going to be a certified life insurance professional who works solely in this particular space within the insurance industry, on their own, without attachment to a particular insurance company. That way, you know they’re working for you and not some company that just wants you on their roster, paying high premiums.