The Habit of Saving
Telling people to “save more money” is empty advice. How? What’s the first step? Today, Ben Franklin helps us define a real, simple, executable plan.
Telling people to “save more money” is empty advice. How? What’s the first step? Today, Ben Franklin helps us define a real, simple, executable plan.
As you probably already know, I’m a nerd. I’m such a nerd that during my spare time I like to read books about money. But more and more, regular personal-finance manuals aren’t enough. I crave something nerdier! And so, I’ve begun to research the history of retirement. Right now, I have four or five books on my office desk that are all about the origins and evolution of retirement.
Turns out, retirement wasn’t always considered desirable (at least not for employees). In the olden days — back in the late 1800s — “mandatory retirement” caused a great deal of resentment among older workers and there was a popular backlash against it. People wanted to keep working, but as big corporations rose to prominence and power, they pushed for a younger workforce.
I haven’t really read enough about the history of retirement to write intelligently on the subject, but I wanted to share a quick observation on the nature of retirement in 2018.
You see, while the idea of retirement might be relatively young, it’s achieved a level of complexity that I find fascinating. Retirement is no longer one thing. It’s many things. Or many possibilities. I thought it might be fun to visualize what I consider the five most common kinds of retirement in our current economy. (Note: Yesterday, we looked at the standard definition of retirement — and how there’s not really any standard definition at all.)
During the 20th century, a standard model of work gained prominence in the United States (and other developed countries). You got a good job, you worked hard for forty or fifty years, and then you retired around age sixty to enjoy the last decade or two of your life. (Your retirement was funded through some combination of company pension, personal savings, and government aid.)
Graphed, the traditional model of work looks like this:
By the 1970s and 1980s, standards of living had risen enough that some folks began to challenge traditional assumptions, even embraced the idea of leaving the workplace.
“Why should we wait until the end of our days to make time to enjoy life?” they wondered. “There’s got to be a better way.”
This “better way” turned out to be early retirement. These brave pioneers ran the numbers and demonstrated what would have been an impossibility just a few decades before. If you worked hard to increase your income while simultaneously striving to keep costs low, it was possible to save enough so that you can stop working at fifty. Or 45. Or forty.
Graphed, the early retirement model looks like this:
The key difference between early retirement and traditional retirement is your saving rate.
The traditional retirement model requires a saving rate of 10% (or maybe 20%). The early retirement model requires you to save half your income — or more. If you’re diligent and build a wealth snowball, you’ll eventually reach a “crossover point” (as described in the 1992 classic Your Money or Your Life): The income from your investments will be enough to support your spending. You’ll have reached financial independence.
These two approaches are the most popular paths to retirement, probably because they lead to permanent retirement. Once you stop working, you’re done. To folks still trapped in the Matrix, these might seem like the only options. But I believe there are at least three other types of retirement.
While visiting Raleigh earlier this month, I spent a morning with my pal Justin (from the excellent Root of Good blog) and his wife. As we sipped our coffee and nibbled our bagels, the conversation turned to cost of living. (Money nerds will be money nerds, after all.)
“Things are cheaper here in North Carolina than they are in Portland,” I said. “Food is cheaper. Beer is cheaper. Hotel rooms are cheaper. Your homes are cheaper too. Last night, as I was walking through the neighborhood next to my hotel, I pulled up the housing prices. I was shocked at how low they are!”
“Yeah, housing costs are lower here than in many parts of the country,” Justin said.
“Take our house, for instance. We bought it in 2003 for $108,000. Zillow says it’s worth around $198,000 right now. But I’ll bet that’s a lot less than you’d pay for a similar place in Portland.”
He’s right. Justin and his wife own an 1800-square-foot home on 0.3 acres of land. Their place has four bedrooms and 2.5 bathrooms. There’s only one place for sale in Portland right now that matches these stats and it’s going for $430,000 — more than twice the price the same home would fetch in Raleigh.
Housing is by far the largest slice of the average American budget, representing one-third of typical household spending. Because of this, the best way to cut your costs (and, therefor, boost your “profit margin”) is to reduce how much you spend to keep a roof over your head.
One obvious way to cut costs on housing is to choose a cheaper home or apartment. But if you truly want to slash your spending, consider moving to a new neighborhood. Or city. Or state. If you’re willing to change locations, you can supercharge your purchasing power and accelerate your saving rate.
Cost of living is one of those factors that people seldom consider, but which can have a huge impact on the family budget â sometimes in unexpected ways. According to The Millionaire Next Door:
Living in less costly areas can enable you to spend less and to invest more of your income. You will pay less for your home and correspondingly less for your property taxes. Your neighbors will be less likely to drive expensive motor vehicles. You will find it easier to keep up, even ahead, of the Joneses and still accumulate wealth.
It’s one thing to talk about the effects of high cost of living, but another to actually experience it.
So much of financial success involves good habits practiced over long periods of time.
Yes, you can still have a positive impact on your financial future if you’re starting late in life — but if you’re 59 years old and just beginning to think about financial freedom, you have a lot of work to do.
But if you’re 19, you have an extra forty years to set yourself up for financial success. This extra time makes a ginormous difference!
I am both a money nerd and a book nerd. Naturally, I get a little giddy when I find old books about money I’ve never heard of before.
While browsing Oregon’s best used bookstore earlier this year, I stumbled on a 1989 book called How to Retire Young by Edward M. Tauber. Tauber retired at the age of 43 from a tenured full professorship as Professor of Marketing at the University of Southern California. He’s written a number of marketing textbooks, but this was his first (and only?) foray into the realm of personal finance.
How to Retire Young is one of the oldest books I’ve found on the subject of early retirement. It’s fun to see how much of the modern financial independence movement is foreshadowed in the book’s pages.
It’s also fun to see how closely How to Retire Young adheres to my own “get rich slowly” philosophy. “Much [financial advice] is oriented toward the quick buck,” writes Tauber, “taking paths that often have a low probability. In short, you might as well play the lottery.”
Tauber has a different philosophy. He urges readers to “take the high road”. He wants them to follow the path with the greatest odds of success, even if that path might not lead to quick wins. He also cautions that “there’s no best way for everyone”, just as I say “do what works for you”. There are certainly best practices and mathematically optimal options, but there aren’t any right options.
Tauber’s premise is that many people can retire early — if they plan and remain dedicated to the plan. He writes:
“If you want to retire early, there are no magic formulas. It requires hard work to make money and requires smart work to learn how to invest on a pretax basis. If you invested 15 to 20 years in school to learn how to make money, why not spend a little effort to plan how to capitalize on your earning power to be able to enjoy it for a third of your life on your terms in early retirement?”
“Think of life has having three periods: schooling, working, and savoring,” he says. Most folks spend the first 20 to 25 years of life in school, work for 40 to 50 years, then leave what’s left for “savoring”. He suggests shifting our perspective. “Why not plan life in three equal installments?” he asks. Spend 25 years in school, work for 25 years, then savor another 25 years — or more.
The issue, as you know, is that there are trade-offs. The opportunity cost of retiring young is the stuff you could have had (and the things you could have done) during your working years. “Early retirement is like anything else that you can purchase,” Tauber writes. You probably won’t have as much discretionary income while you’re saving or when you retire, but you will have the time to enjoy what you do have.”
Tauber says the reason most people don’t retire early is they don’t think it’s possible. More than that, they’re not willing to wait to spend their money. They want to spend it now. They’re working hard, earning money, and they feel like they deserve to indulge themselves.
What’s more, the average person “cannot visualize the possibility that [work] might slow or stop”. People fall victim to the forever fallacy. As a result, they get trapped in what Tauber calls the work-spend cycle.
When you want everything now, you get it now — but that means exactly what it implies: having it now, not later. “It’s a prescription for a lifetime of work and spend,” Tauber warns. It’s also a prescription for living on less when you’re older. If you want money now and later, you have to plan for it. You have to want it badly or it won’t happen. And “if you want to retire early, you have to do it yourself, using the system to your best advantage.”
Today’s article is from Chad Carson, who writes about real estate investing (and other money matters) at Coach Carson. I’ve always been intrigued by real estate investing but overwhelmed by how much info available. I asked Chad if he’d be willing to write an article that would help me (and other GRS readers) understand the basics of real estate investing. This is the result.
I got started in real estate investing right after college. Because a young adult can basically sleep in a car if he has to (my 1998 Toyota Camry with cloth seats was comfortable), I had little to lose by launching a business. Unfortunately, as a Biology major, I also knew very little about business or real estate. But I did know how to hustle and to learn. That helped.
Slowly, I learned to find good deals and to resell them for a small markup of profit (a.k.a. wholesaling). I also learned to buy, fix, and flip houses for a bigger profit (a.k.a. retailing). After a few years, my business partner and I began keeping some rental properties because we knew that was the path to generating regular, passive income.
While my early business might sound like an exciting HGTV house-flipping show, it’s not for everyone. I experienced radical ups and downs of cash flow, and there were many unpredictable outcomes. I learned a lot being a full-time investor, but there are actually easier ways to get started.
Most investors I know started with a full-time job. They became valuable at their job, earned good money, lived frugally, and started boosting their saving rate. With their extra savings, they began buying rental properties on the side.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t begin as a real estate entrepreneur like I did — you’ll know if you’re called to make that leap — but if you currently have a non-real estate job and you’re saving money, you’re already going down the easiest path.
The next step is to learn how to invest that money profitably and safely. I personally think real estate investing is one of the best ways to do that. I’ll show you why that’s the case in the next section.
I’ve yet to find a better way to describe the benefits of real estate than this. All you need to remember is the acronym I.D.E.A.L:
These IDEAL benefits are core reasons to invest in real estate. But as a Get Rich Slowly reader, I think you’ll appreciate another core real estate investing benefit: control!
I love J.D.’s message here at Get Rich Slowly: You are the boss of you! You can apply this lesson to so many parts of life, but it especially applies to your finances. Real estate investing fits very well with the GRS philosophy. Why? Because real estate gives you much more control than other more traditional investments.
I’m also a fan of low-cost index fund investing, for example, but do you have an impact on the returns of your stock portfolio? Not really. The 3500+ managers of the companies owned by the VTI total stock market index fund do impact your returns, but not you personally. You simply control when you buy, how much you buy, and when you sell.
But with a rental duplex, for example, your decisions directly affect its profitability (for better or worse!).
If this prospect of control excites you, then keep reading. But if your palms are clammy at the idea of hands-on investments, just focus on a different vehicle. That’s okay. There are options for everyone in this big investing universe!
To make things manageable, we’re going to break things down a little. As a baby, you learned to walk by taking tiny steps. You also fell down a lot, but with a diaper four inches from the ground, what’s the harm?!
Well, you’re no longer a baby. Financially you do have a lot to lose. Your family, your hard-earned savings, your plans for financial independence, and your pride would all suffer if you made bad investments.
I get that. And that’s why we still need to take safe, baby steps. There’ll be plenty of time to run and grow faster once you’re more confident. But in the beginning, just strive to move forward steadily.
The seven baby steps below provide a simple path to follow. I’ve taken each of these steps personally. You can use them as a blueprint to help you move forward with your own real estate investments.
My name is Zach, and I write at Four Pillar Freedom, where I tend to tackle financial topics through data visualization. While J.D. is on vacation, I offered to explore one of his favorite topics: the effects of saving rate versus investment returns.
Albert Einstein supposedly once said that compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world.But does data actually support this claim?
In this post, I explore the nature of compound interest, how long it takes to become an important factor in wealth accumulation, and whether or not it actually matters much for people who hope to achieve financial independence in a relatively short time.
What matters more: your saving rate or your investment returns?
Suppose your goal is to achieve a net worth of $1 million. If you invest $10,000 every year and earn a 7% annual return on your investments — which is a reasonable assumption for long-term stock market returns — you’ll accumulate $1 million in about 30.7 years.
The chart below shows exactly how long it would take to reach every $100,000 net worth milestone, using the assumptions of a $10,000 annual investment earning a 7% annual return:
Notice how each $100,000 net worth milestone takes less time to reach than the last. In fact, it’s mind-boggling to see that it will take youlongerto go from $0 to $100,000 than it will to go from $600,000 to $1 million:
The first $100,000 takes the longest to save because you don’t receive much help from investment returns early on. The time it takes you to go from $0 to $100,000 is mostly dependent on the gap between your income and your spending.
Everybodyâs financial situation — age, income, saving rate — is different.
But every retiree, early or late, aspiring or actual, has the same, simple investing imperative: We must preserve and grow our purchasing power in real terms in order to finance decades of future consumption.
This sounds simple (which it is) and obvious (which it isnât).
Let’s assume you’re forty years old. Every week, you buy a six-pack of your favorite microbrew for $10. You have $520 in savings that will buy you your weekly six-pack for all of 2019. Life is good.
Here, for instance, is GRS founder J.D. Roth with a $10.19 six-pack of his favorite beer, which he’s drinking while he edits this article:
Now, let’s assume that the cost of this six-pack increases by 3% annually — which is a reasonable estimate of inflation. Every year, your $520 in savings buys you 3% less beer.
In thirty years, when youâre seventy and still enjoying your suds, that six-pack that costs you $10 now will cost you $24.27, which is a $1,262 annual expense if you continue to buy a six-pack a week.
In other words, your $520 in savings has to increases by nearly 145% to $1,262 over the next thir[s]ty years to merely maintain — let alone increase — your current beer consumption.
It gets worse.
Even if everything goes according to plan and your beer money grows from $520 in 2019 to $1,262 in 2049, youâll need to sell $1,262 worth of your investments to get the cash for your beer. That will trigger a $750 taxable gain, and at a 25% federal and state tax, you’ll have to pay approximately $188 in taxes. Your beer money is now approximately $1,074. This only buys you 44 six-packs of beer in 2049, whereas you were consuming 52 six-packs in 2019.
In other words, due to inflation and the taxation of nominal gains, youâll be poorer, with a lower standard of living, thirty years from now.
This bears repeating: A 3% pre-tax return on your investments will not preserve, let alone grow, your current standard of living.
“Time is money,” my father used to tell me when I was a boy. He didn’t like how I dawdled with my chores. I didn’t understand what he meant back then. To me, time and money were two very different things. As a kid, I had lots of time but very little money.
Now, as a nearly fifty-year-old man who has written about personal finance for the past twelve years, I get it. Dad was right: Time is money â and money is time.
This notion is the central lesson of Your Money or Your Life, the personal-finance classic by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin. “Money is something we choose to trade our life energy for,” they write. “You are the one who determines what money is worth to you. It is your life energy. You ‘pay’ for money with your time. You choose how to spend it.”
The authors say that because you spend time in order to earn money, you’re also spending time whenever you make a purchase. This has some powerful implications.
Because of the time factor, Dominguez and Robin argue that you don’t earn as much as you think you do. You may be paid $33 an hour, but your real hourly wage is less than that. Possibly much less.
Howdy. My name is Michael Robinson. While J.D. is visiting Europe with his cousins, I volunteered to share how my wife and I have leveraged the power of geographic arbitrage to pursue our dreams — and to build our wealth.
Geographic arbitrage means taking advantage of the differences in prices between various locations. You earn money in a stronger economy (San Francisco, maybe, or the U.S. in general) and spend it in a weaker economy (South Dakota or Ecuador, for instance).
Geographic arbitrage is a powerful tactic worth considering if you want to increase your saving rate so that you can better pursue your financial goals. Several times over the course of our lives together so far, my wife and I have managed to unwittingly stumble upon the benefits of geographic arbitrage.