| Tricks of the Trade© |
Morning edition Wednesday September 6, 2000 |
Invest Now
My Trick of the Trade is pretty simple. Invest now in your future. I had to laugh at something my niece said to me while we were on vacation last month. She has been taking several honors classes and preparing for college. As a result she has had to spend most of her summer reading as many as 50 pages a night. I looked at her and said, Krista you need to take a course in speed-reading. She said, I would but I don't have the time. That's Ironic I thought because as you know if she could read the material faster she would have more time. Anyway, people tend to take the same approach to life. I can't invest anything right now; I'm just too broke. Guess what? Tomorrow chances are that same person will still be too broke to do anything. But are they really? How much goes to eating out, cable TV, renting movies, etc? One of the most eye opening things you can do is take a note pad with you and write down everything you send. You might begin to see patterns and identify areas that you may be able to cut back and save on. When it comes to investing what we do in our own house is look at it like any other monthly bill. We view investing the same way as we would a car payment. I sat down a few years ago with a professional financial planner and we made a game plan. I have about $500 dollars per month that goes in different but very important directions. Some goes to life insurance that grows and is tied to the stock market, some goes to a disability policy should I become unable to work, and the rest goes into a fund that builds and gets invested in to three mutual funds for our retirement. Money has a way of growing over many years and can double and triple many times over. But, many people wait till much to late to let this start working in their favor. If you start investing when your 30 and you plan to retire when you are 65. Your money will have 35 years to grow and be reinvested. But if you don't start till your 50 it is not going to have the same chance to grow at the same rate. However, it is still better to start at 50 then to do nothing at all. I strongly recommend setting some predetermined amount aside each month to invest in your future. Think of it like any other bill you have. Ours payment is actually set up as an automatic withdrawal from our checking. Before long you may find you're not so broke after all. Dave
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