So I’ve been a bad Personal Finance Blogger as of late.
And not just because I’ve not been posting (blame the new house!). But because I haven’t done the one thing that I always tell people to do.
I haven’t set up my Roth IRA contributions for the year. And it’s May.
Do you have a Roth IRA? If not, why not? It’s a great way to save for retirement. Sure, there aren’t tax benefits now, but there will be tax benefits later.
I know that I still have time to set up my Roth for this year. And I’m thinking that I may add a fund to my account. I use Vanguard, which I am really happy with, but some of their funds require a minimum buy-in. So I might need to put out $3000 at once. Not a big deal, just requires a bit more planning. And hey, since I haven’t started my funding yet, maybe this is the year that I add a fund.
It’s hard to think about retirement when I know I’ve got at least another 30 years of working. But every penny counts.
Megan is a 30-something government employee in the Washington, DC area. She got interested in Personal Finance when she got out of college and realized that her paycheck wasn’t going to go as far as she had hoped. Since starting this blog, she has managed to buy a house and make a solid start on her retirement goals, and hopes to help others do the same. Here is her story:
In 2007, I was a gainfully employed 20-something with no debt but not a lot of knowledge about personal finance. It was a co-worker’s comment about Roth IRAs that sent me to the internet, searching for information. It was then that I realized that I really didn’t know a whole lot about personal finance and that my current financial situation was due a lot to inherent frugal tendencies, generous family members, a fear of debt, and good luck. While that was working for me, clearly I needed a better plan.
While I had no debt, I was also pretty much living paycheck to paycheck and not worrying about going over budget (I say this as if I had a real budget) because I had an emergency fund set aside to cover any overages.
Except that’s not what an emergency fund is for.
So I did a lot of research, read a lot of blogs, and decided that I needed a plan. I needed to budget. I needed to know what I was spending my money on. I needed to prepare for the future.
I decided to create a blog not only to make myself accountable to others but also to share the knowledge that I gained along the way. I’ve learned so much from my fellow bloggers, and I hope that my readers can find something useful in what I have to share as well.
If you haven’t done this yet, Vanguard dropped their minimum for a regular IRA down to $1000 (we no longer qualify for a Roth 🙁 ), so they may have done so for the Roth as well. Get moving and check it out, it may not be as painful as you think.