Alright guys, I try to only share valuable, actionable intelligence with you on this blog, and I feel inclined to give you a quick piece of financial advice that you’ll be happy to have been made privy to. A dude from Primerica (an investment & financial advice company) just stopped by our house to tell us about their company & the services they provide.
I wasn’t very happy to listen to what he had to say, because A) he’s obviously a commission-based marketer, just like me (and us marketers don’t really like being pitched to) and B) I’m not a fan of meeting with anybody outside of my computer. Primerica seems to be a pretty legit, down to earth, no pressure company that offers sound financial advice without any hype. Anyways, I’m not trying to talk about how great Primerica the company is, I’m going to tell you something that you can thank me for in 50 years:
As soon as you turn 18 (or if you’re older than 18, now!), you need to start a Roth IRA & contribute the max amount possible. Max annual contribution = $5000. Max That Shit Out! I don’t care if you do it through Primerica, Sharebuilder, TD Ameritrade, or any of a number of other companies. Just do it. Do it as soon as you can. I don’t care to go into the details of why, or provide a fancy column of numbers that show how much the investment will make you, you can Google that all on your own. All you need to know is that you need to start a Roth IRA…like 2 years ago (in my case).
The guy showed me a chart that showed person A that started maxing out a roth at like 22 years old, then stopped at 30 and didn’t invest a cent more after that until retirement. At the bottom of the page it showed that after all those years his investment amounted to like 1.5Mil. Then he showed another person, we’ll call him person B, that started at 30 and maxed their roth out every year, and then retired at the same time that person A retired. Guess what? His investment only ended up being around the same 1.5Mil amount. What does that mean? That it’s super duper duper important to start a roth IRA and max it out as young as you can possibly start one!
If you don’t believe me, do some Googling and read about Roth IRA’s. I have nothing personally to benefit from writing this post (not that I usually do or anything), but I really think you should take my advice.
I’m going to meet with an accountant in the next day or two to get my finances in order so I can start being a responsible human being and contributing to a Roth IRA myself. I’ll probably meet with the Primerica dude a time or two more so he can advise me on some more wise investments. Looking forward to it. I swear, it’s all about the people you know so that you can get the information that you need to know that is vital to your success in life. It’s all about learning…and then taking action.
