We all know that securing our future is important. To be able to take care of ourselves and our families in our old age, we should have savings, investments, or a retirement plan. But if we all know that, why aren’t we doing it yet? Too many of us aren’t putting as much effort into securing these as much as we should. Heck, not too many of us are making the effort at all!

You would think that with all the fiscal crises going on all around the world, everyone would go “I should save up for retirement or make an investment and secure my future!”

But not everyone is saving up. Not everyone is investing. Not everyone has a retirement plan. Not everyone is feeling the urgency. What’s going on?

There is this survey from Charles Schwab that could maybe explain this.

“Out of the 1,000 adults ages 25-70 who responded to the Schwab poll, a full third said they weren’t saving enough for retirement because they didn’t want to make lifestyle sacrifices today.”  

One third! Whew! That’s a large percent. That’s 33% of adults saying that they’d rather live it up right now and worry about the future…in the future.

Like that old adage says, “it’s never too late to start.” If you start now, you’ll hopefully have enough to retire comfortably. Don’t think about it as one great big house all at once. You build it over time brick by brick. It’s more like a marathon than a sprint.

So we go to the big question, how do I get started? The easiest way is to take advantage of work sponsored retirement plan contributions. This is such an easy kickoff point to building a retirement fund because a portion of your salary gets automatically deducted. Your contributions are automatically deducted from your paycheck and matched by your employer. It’s so easy, you don’t even have to think about it. So, if you have something like this being offered by your employer – take advantage of it.

Next, you can go find investment opportunities. Unlike the automatic retirement fund, this one takes more work. You can do the research yourself or you can find a financial planner to help you decide on which investments are worth checking out and getting into.

I am not a financial planner, so I won’t go into the details of bonds and stocks and hedge funds. I’ve watched too much “Suits” to try to explain that. But you might want to consider easy long term investments. This is making the most out of money – investing is kind of letting your money work for you and not the other way around. If you’re savvy enough to do it yourself, then by all means do so. But start now! If you need a little help, find a financial planner that can help you build a portfolio.

You have to be prudent though, if you are to engage in this long term investment thing, the money you invest should be money you won’t be needing for a while. Shannon McLay, financial planner from FinancialGym.net says a good rule to follow is this “If you won’t need the money for a long time, then pick a later target date fund or a more aggressive asset allocation fund. If you need the money sooner, then pick an earlier target date fund or a conservative asset allocation fund.”

At the end of the day, we all think we deserve to spend our hard earned money on making our lives more fun and comfortable and we all rightfully deserve to do that. But we all rightfully deserve a secure future too. So maybe if we make concessions to save a little for the future, we won’t end up living from paycheck to paycheck or working well until our twilight years.

As always, remember to: Stay Humble, Hustle Hard. Good luck!

Written by Jaie O. – The Help