MBTC

Your employer either provides it or they don't. If they do, rest assured you will be offered meeting sessions once or twice a year minimum where some dude from a bank tells you and everyone else in your division some things that are interesting the first time you hear them, then become infinitely repetitive later, so here's the skinny but it won't matter until time comes to actually participate...

Basically you can have a percentage of your paycheck deducted for 401k (retirement plan). The best...or perhaps only really valuable... aspect to it is that it's pre-tax. This means that if you are deducting $200 per month, it is $200 per month of your gross instead of your net. That means $200 of your income goes into your savings instead of say $135. Great right? You just earned a gratuitous $65 for doing nothing! Not really.. It is tax-deferred savings, which means that you saved the taxes now on the promise you will pay them later... Since it's retirement money, when you do start to make withdrawals on this money, you will be something like 70 years old crapping your diaper and ultimately paying a much lower tax rate.. Which is great because it means with the lower tax rate you just saved ten bucks (only since it is a full 50 years later, adjusted for inflation that ten bucks will only buy you a spare diaper).

Yes I am being playful but the thing I wanted to point out is that you need to educate yourself on retirement savings and what it all really means to you. Twenty years or so ago, they were telling young hopefuls like myself how we could all be millionaires by the time we retire if we just followed what finance people thought they knew at the time. The problem is that for the most part 401k investments (depending on how you allocate them) follow the stock market which has its ups and downs, but for the most part has not lived up to expectations. The investments that I have that have done the best over the last 20 years were those that were in secured bonds with a crap (but stable) interest rate. Everything else has turned out to be a pipe dream, especially with the gimmicks that banks were allowed to set up under the GWB administration. I don't want to get into politics here but let's just say 401k can be a nice savings mechanism but don't count on getting anywhere close to the "proposed" interest rates in the long term, and more than that keep a pistol under the pillow for when you're 70 something and the last diaper runs out

SaintNexus

^Great information, but I'm actually hoping to retire between the ages of 40-55. Most Firefighters retire at 55, but I'm gonna try to do it 10-15 years earlier. Unless I become a FireChief when I'm around 45, then I'll probably work another 5 years before retiring.

dayrinni

You probably get a pension? That is huge...assuming they are still around when you retire.

javyLSU

iTrader: (21)

Off-topic doesn't even begin to describe this thread. If you'd like to discuss the next generation IS, see this thread.

https://www.clublexus.com/forums/is-...on-thread.html

Javier