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I can vouch for this: Personal finance writers field plenty of cocktail-chatter questions about managing and investing money. That's certainly true for Mark Bruno, a 30-year-old reporter who writes about retirement and investing for Financial Week. Inspired by questions from friends, family, and peers about getting started with their retirement savings, Bruno wrote Save Now or Die Trying: Achieving Long-Term Wealth in Your 20s and 30s, which he says offers pointers on "saving the right way." Here, he shares a handful of those tips:
How do you know if you're on the right track with your 401(k)?
Everyone has different incomes, debts, and lifestyles. It's too difficult to say that a certain level of savings means you're on track--because while it might be true for some, it may be totally meaningless to others. Plus, if you're 30 to 40 years away from retiring, you should just be concentrating on how you're going to start saving, and not what it will take for you to stop.
It's important to consider, too, what you'll be giving up if you don't start saving in your 20s and 30s. Consider this example, which is included in the beginning of my book: Say you're 40 years old, you make $50,000 a year and you have no money saved for retirement right now. You want to retire at 65 and you can't live on less than $40,000 a year. If you put away 10 percent of your salary now until you turn 65, and you get pretty good returns on your investments (let's assume 9 percent), your retirement savings |
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