<$Thursday, February 7, 2008$>
Wealth building strategies
| This year, we're focusing on getting rid of our debt. Hopefully by next year, though, we'll be ready to start building our retirement. We've got a lot of catching up to do in this department. I've got my 401k, of course, but I only contribute what the company matches, and I've only been doing that for about a year and a half. If we rely on that alone for retirement savings, we'll end up poor old people. Once we start building our retirement portfolio, I'd like to investigate hard money investment strategies. Real estate trust deed investing looks like a relatively safe form of passive high-yield investing--and passive investing is perfect when you're talking ADD--but I'd need to learn a lot more about it before I took that plunge. Besides, if I understand correctly, we'd need to actually own a home and have a few years vested in it before that would even become an option for us. So I guess our next step, after building up our emergency and rainy day funds, will be to go the standard route and open up a Roth IRA. Once that's done--and, hopefully, maxed out--we'll look into the trickier stuff. First things first, though: gotta pay off those credit cards. We're actually considering using the next two student loan checks to do that. As much as we're tempted to do other things with that money, we both know the smartest would be to eliminate the consumer debt. That would free up so much cash flow that we'd almost feel downright rich. Labels: debt reduction, saving+investing |
