Life After Full-time Work Blog

Financial professionals often tell us that they want to speak our language, then retreat into jargon. I’ve learnt about the difference.

In the same way that we observed that there’s more to life than money (see Post #4), so too there’s more to spending money than obtaining something that’s useful to us. Here are some emotional benefits.

We’ve discussed retirement saving at some length. But when we’re young, we have other long-term financial goals too. Where do buying a home and insuring one’s life fit in?

Are there any guideposts as to what you should be doing and what you should be thinking about, at different stages in your financial life? Let’s look at minimum, successful and exceptional standards at five stages.

I thought it might be interesting to check in with a family currently saving for retirement and also getting their next generation thinking early along those lines. You might be surprised by the source for the lesson that the father teaches.

These days the retirement scene is changing, around the world. More and more, the onus is placed on individuals, rather than on pooled arrangements. But it’s possible for new forms of pooling to be made available by employers, associations and unions, and they would help employees enormously.

People don’t realize what a huge impact it has when we add investment returns to our savings over a lifetime, or how important it is to keep the investment effort going after retirement. In this post we’ll look at some numbers and come up with a simple rule of thumb.

In Post #1 we saw that we need to set aside money while we’re working if we want to draw on it later so that we don’t have to work forever. This post picks up on that idea, and explores how much we need to save, as well as what our choices are if we don’t save as much as we need to. Make sure you also read Post #18, which will make you feel much better!

Sometimes we think that making a budget is a long, complicated process. But for the purpose of setting a financial target, it doesn’t have to be. It’s surprising how simple it can be, while still being useful.