Retirement planning for under-40s — Roth IRAs, the 401(k) employer match, compound interest, and how much to save by 30, 35 and 40, explained simply and early enough to matter.
“How much should I have saved by 30?” is one of the most-searched money questions on the internet – and the most-quoted answer comes from Fidelity: 1x your salary by 30, 3x by 40, 6x by 50, 8x by 60, and 10x by 67. It’s a clean, memorable rule. It’s also widely misunderstood, frequently used …
What an index fund actually is An index fund is a single investment that holds a little piece of hundreds of companies at once, by copying a market index. The most famous example: an S&P 500 index fund holds all 500 of the largest U.S. companies — Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, and 497 others — in …
Ask a room of twenty-somethings about their retirement plan and you will hear a familiar chorus: “I’ll start saving when I earn more.” It sounds responsible. It feels prudent. And it might be the most expensive sentence in personal finance. The reason is an account with a complicated-sounding name and a beautifully simple job: the …
If your employer offers a 401(k) match and you’re not contributing enough to capture all of it, you’re doing the equivalent of skipping your paycheck on a Friday. The employer match is widely considered the best guaranteed return in personal finance: for every dollar you put in (up to a limit), your employer adds free …