You have got to set a goal to not work yourself to the bone and plan this early in your working career. I don’t care if you are just starting your career fresh out of college or right after high school. Just plan it. It’s not going to take a miracle. I’m not going to share anything new and exciting. Its tried and true, no gimmicks.
As soon as you start making a paycheck from anywhere, plan on retiring early. Like way early. With a few choice moves, you can retire early, comfortably and reach financial independence without much effort. Man, if I had known this stuff back in the day, I can only imagine how many surgeries I could have avoided. Seriously though, ask yourself. Do you want to work until you are 67 yrs. old? Do you want to work for the man until that blessed social security check starts coming? No, no, no. No, you don’t.
Read, read, read and learn as much as you can
It all started with those few Money magazines that I picked up in the grocery store line. Then I started watching the Suze Orman show. Many in the FI (Financial Independence) community may not be on the same page with Suze’s dislike for the FI generation but Suze’s show is where I got my first hit of the saving addiction. The FI community vary between frugality, living within their means, travel hacks, and saving a ton to retire early and do what they love and if it makes them money, then all the better. Here is the link for the interview with Paul Pant @affordanything.com Paula is another one of those awesome saving and do what you love kind of financially independent people. https://affordanything.com/why-i-hate-the-fire-movement-says-suze-orman/
Anyway, my biggest take away in the beginning with Suze was to have an emergency fund. This could not mean more than it does right now with the mess the government shut down created. It wreaked havoc for weeks for folks who didn’t have enough savings. Anyway, after listening to Suze for a while on her show she had, I immediately started saving towards 6 months of emergency fund. Now, the emergency fund was to pay for my mortgage, utilities, food, etc. The necessities. I had already determined that in the worst-case scenario, that I would cut cable and other unnecessary things from my expenses in cases of emergencies. From there, the savings just increased for those emergency moments. I eventually got up to 10 months worth of savings and decided that was enough. I felt safe with that and with that said, I will leave that here and discuss more on the next post about the panic at work and my retirement savings.