Month: August 2022

How to Contribute to a Retirement Plan – There are still many people who still don’t understand retirement. Whereas retirement is something that will happen to all of us and in fact, there are still many people who are not aware of this.

When you start working, no matter how old are you and no matter what kind of job you are doing. You must tell yourself that you should have a retirement plan. A retirement plan is something really important for you to have because it will impact your future. That’s why you must think about the retirement plan.

Simple Tips to Help you Contribute a Retirement Plan

When you start planning your retirement, you need to think about a lot of things, of course, it will be a difficult thing to do because maybe you still have no idea about what to do first. That’s why in this article today, we will give you some tips that might be very helpful for you, in preparing for your retirement.

You can consider this as a helping hand that will be perfect for you, especially when you planning your retirement. Here are the following tips that you can follow so check this out.

1. You Must Focus on Starting Earlier

When you have a plan about retiring, you need to do it as fast as you can. It means you must start saving right now, today, and don’t delay it anymore. The faster you start your plan; it will be better your future. That’s why you must start earlier and make sure that you know what to do because it will help you make everything easier. You can start saving as much as you can because this will be your starting point, which will bring a great impact on your future.

2. You Must Contribute to the 401(k) Account

If your company offers you a conventional 401(k) plan, it will allow you to help yourself contribute in pretax money, which also can be potential and also can be a very significant advantage. You must think about this because this scenario will help you get a better life in the future, especially when you retire. That’s why you must try to contribute to these 401(K) accounts because the impact will be very great for you and your family in the future.

3. You Must Meet your Employer’s Match

If your boss offers you to match your 401(k)-planning contribution, make sure that you have contributed, at least enough to get the advantages. If your boss offers you this, you have to make sure that you have contributed enough to the company. This could be something that great for your retirement plan. Why? Because you will get mostly 5% on each contribution you’ve made each month, and this will sound great for your retirement plan, right?

4. Investment

To make sure your future is safe, you must think about doing some investments. Doing this will help your plan, and also when you retire, you can still make money from the investment you did when you were still younger. That’s why doing some investments will be perfect and a great tool that will help you with your future retirement plan.

5. You Must Calculate the Remaining Productive Time you Have

It’s very important for you to calculate the productive time that you have left because it will help you to prepare for your retirement. If you are 26 years old and will retire at age 58, then you have about 32 years of productive time left. During those 32 years, you must have a plan for what to achieve and realistically let go of anything that can’t be achieved. This awareness is very important so that you can make an effective decision.

6. Making Financial Planning Wisely

When you create a financial plan, there are several factors you should consider. These factors are retirement plan age, assumed life expectancy, calculation of living needs after retirement, and time to prepare pension funds.

In a very simple way, if the life expectancy you are describing is about 75 years while you are going to retire at 60, then you have 15 years of retirement to think about. If you plan on spending a living cost of about 5 thousand per month, then the finance that must be achieved for 15 years of retirement is about 900 thousand. These funds must be obtained during your productive working period.

You also need to know that the preparation of the pension fund should be distinguished from an emergency fund. An emergency fund is a different budget that must also be prepared to meet unexpected needs, especially for health or for maintenance your home.

7. You Must Make Long Term Investment

Many people find it difficult to save funds for retirement. With the allocation of salaries for various needs, the pension fund is described as not being achieved. therefore, investment is a step that must be chosen. Successful investment can make you retire early.

Instead of just collecting money and keeping it as savings, developing funds through various investment instruments is a more profitable step. Simply, if you invest 10 million today, it will grow to 12 million in the next few years.

There is also various investment instrument to choose from, to prepare for retirement. For example, gold, bonds, and mutual funds. Some of these instruments were chosen because they are relatively safe and do not require active steps from investors.

8. Financial Health Control

If you have prepared a financial plan and made investments regularly, the next thing to do is to continue to control your financial condition from an early age. This step is important because lifestyle mistakes in youth will affect financial conditions in retirement. Two focuses that must be considered in controlling financial health are:

• You must reduce the consumptive debt
• And don’t reduce emergency fund

Those are a few things that we can give to you for now. Hopefully, this can help to open your mind to start a very good retirement plan.

When you work in a company in any field, it will be all about the perks. However, meanwhile, most of the employees have their focus on the whimsy of the office, and many of the employees will likely neglect the benefits that might be real for them.

Few Tips to Help you Maximize the Employment Benefits

Whether it’s the legal access to insurance assistance to help you cover for your family or if there might be something happening to you. These benefits could be something substantial to help both of you shortly. Thus, it might be very imperative for you to be able to maximize the potential that you will wind up with the money on the table.

So, keep that in mind, and let’s look at the few things that you could get the best out of your benefits packages.

1. You Must Understand What is Available

There are many professions that they don’t understand and don’t realize that the company will offer them more than just simple and occasional pleasure. In any scenario, you can have access to a variety of benefits that might be able to help you to get stability in your finance from your current job. However, if you aren’t asking the company or you don’t do your research, how will you tell yourself that they exist?

The first step that you should take to help you maximize employee benefits is to see which ones are available first. And then after that, you can try to look up the voluntary benefits, which mostly will be offered by the employer and also it will get paid by the employee. While you might not know how to utilize them, you still can take advantage of them, which will help you to provide peace for yourself and your family in the future.

When you are looking for these kinds of benefits, you must have to realize that it’s not all of them will give you financial offer incentives. Getting extra money will be nice, but you also have to think about anything, like the value of certain options that you might have.

2. You Must Save your Money for Matching Programs

There are many companies where you can get free money from the employer when it comes to saving for retirement. Let’s say, if you have about 401K, your company will help you to match the contribution that you made to a percentage of the salary that you get each month. Usually, it will be around 1% to 3%. However, if you are not making any contributions, you will not get anything.

You also must learn about how to budget your salary, since it will be a very challenging thing to do. Especially when you might live in a high-cost area including your family. You must consider this free money, and you must try to get it as much as possible.

Even when you cannot max out the benefits that you get each month. You must save at least a little so that your employer will be able to match it for you. One of the good contributions that will give you some money is working overtime; this will help to enable you to get more money for your retirement funds.

3. You Must Utilize your Health Saving Accounts

To help you cut down some costs, some employers can switch plans that might have a very high deductible. This means you will have to pay more money from your pocket, especially when you go to the hospital or doctor. Although you cannot always switch the plan, you still can utilize your health account instead.

The main benefits of this kind of account are that they will grow the money tax-free and also the funds will be utilized especially for medical expenses only, while the money that you have is still in there. But, if you don’t need it, you always can withdraw the money later, but of course, it will include the tax-free earnings.

Those are the three most important things on how you can maximize your employment benefits. We hope with this information, you will understand everything and it will help you in finding the perfect answer to your question.

There are many people out there, who always think that the real success is, those who are financially successful. This is indeed true. Then, how do we measure someone’s success based on finance?

6 Best to Measure Financial Success on Someone

Today we will talk about the best way to measure financial success. If you are looking for this kind of information, you might like to read this article, because we will provide you with the most accurate information that will give you knew knowledge, which could be very useful.

The first thing that we must know first is what success is. After we understand what success means, then we can conclude identify what is indeed an indicator of success itself.

Success means succeeding in various aspects, you could say, success is success, regardless of what success it is. Success is often associated with the economic and social life of an individual. Then how to measure the financial success of an individual? These are some of the things you should know, to see someone’s success in their finances and economy.

1. Health and Life are Covered by Insurance

First, health and life are covered by insurance. One of the things that you need to have to be a financial success is self-protection. Have you signed up for life insurance and/or health insurance? Insurance will help you to minimize future risks.

This risk can have a big impact on your financial stability. With health insurance, you can pay for hospital fees without burdening your finances. Meanwhile, life insurance can protect your small family in the worst-case scenario, if you have a vehicle, it’s a good idea to have it insured so that when your car is damaged, the costs incurred are not too large.

2. Sufficient Investment

The second is about investment. You can be a person with financial success if you have invested. Keeping money in savings will not provide significant benefits. The savings interest could not cover the inflation that occurs. However, by saving, you can get a safe reserve fund. If the funds from savings have been collected it’s time to invest.

There are many kinds of investment products. You just have to choose the one that suits your needs and recognize the risks well. It’s good to invest with a return value above inflation.

3. Have a Pension

You can be said to be someone who is financially successful if you have a pension. Everyone wants to feel safe in old age. You can enjoy life without having to think about finances in old age. This is because old age is an important phase in life. What you want to be like in retirement depends on your income and savings while still working. It is better to prepare for retirement early so that it can be maximized.

4. Have Children’s Education Funds

One of the indicators that will indicate you as a person with financial success is having children’s education funds. This means your child’s future is safe and sound. If you have children, education is very important. Through education, children are expected to live more successfully than their parents. Moreover, the current cost of education is quite spectacular, so it is necessary to have financial planning for education funds from an early age. You can try education insurance to guarantee your children’s future education.

5. Have an Emergency Funds

An emergency fund is very important in your life. You can save half of your base salary every month to get an emergency fund. This emergency fund is used for sudden needs that require large funds. However, if there is no sudden need, these funds can be used as future savings.

6. Debt for Productive Activities

Debt can be a very dangerous thing if used for consumption behavior. Financially independent and successful is debt-free, but many people are still in debt.

Even if you are forced into debt, as much as possible owe it in a form of productive activities that can also generate money or even be converted into productive assets so that you can get income from your debit.

That is the best way to help you measure the financial success of someone or even yourself. Hopefully, this could be something that gives a piece of very good information.

Adolescence according to psychological studies means a period of transition from childhood to adulthood. This is the time when a person begins to learn many things towards adulthood. How to manage finances is an important thing that must be known by teenagers.

What makes teenagers need to understand how to manage finances? Teenagers need to know how to manage money so that they can save and be good at managing their finances when running a household, and have plans for a better future. They are able to protect themselves from emergency events, independent person, and others.

Managing finances is not easy, especially for teenagers. At this stage, not many teenagers are aware and understand the importance of managing finances, and the lack of awareness among parents about the importance of teaching children to manage finances. Schools also play less of a role in helping youth to understand effective ways to manage their finances. Managing finances is not easy even for adults. So, it would be better if the awareness was built as early as possible.

Manage Finance for Teenagers

Check out some easy tips to learn about ways for teens to manage their finances.

Make financial records by recording income and expenses. This is a simple and trivial thing, but getting used to being more orderly in making financial records can help us know how much money we spend, what we buy, which spending items are too big, etc., so that for the next we can evaluate to make savings.

Try to live frugally by spending money carefully. There are many ways to start a frugal life, for example bringing food supplies from home when going to work or school, not spending too much time traveling in expensive malls or cafes, not buying unnecessary things, or just chasing trends.

Taking advantage of discounts and sales promotions offered by many sellers at a certain moment is the right way and time to buy the items we need. Because, the discount period or sales promotion is an opportunity that doesn’t come all the time, and we can use it to buy the items we want at low prices. We have the opportunity to buy goods in large quantities, the quality of the goods is still good but the price is cheaper. Of course, taking advantage of discounts allows us to set aside money to save and use for other essential purposes.

You should avoid spending money on spending excessively because it can make you experience some financial losses. The amount of money that should be enough for one month’s needs runs out in a few days. Excessive shopping desires are stimulated when we visit shopping centers too often or visit online shopping sites. We recommend that you start limiting visits to shopping centers or visiting shopping sites.

Avoid wrong associations in adolescence which that period is a time of making friends, hanging out, and socializing. The nature of teenagers is very easily influenced by the environment need to be selective in choosing friends, which is very important for teenagers. Good friends bring good effects and vice versa.

Don’t be easily influenced by famous people. Nowadays, many teenagers make celebrities their role models and idols. But unfortunately, not many celebrities make video content with a positive charge. Most celebrities show only focus on hedonic lifestyles, squandering money on luxury goods. There are many cases of celebrities getting into debt to look luxurious.

Start Invest and Save Early

Must invest and save from a young age. Discipline saving or saving money do not come from leftover money. But set aside money from the start to save.

Having extra income isn’t just for adults. Teenagers must be able to do it and make sure that it will not interfere with their educational duties and obligations. Choose the type of work that teenagers can do, such as tutoring elementary school children, and so on.

Start saving and investing as early as possible so that you can get unexpected results in your old age so that the life of your old age and your offspring will not experience economic difficulties. Educate your children so that they can take advantage of that success wisely so they don’t slip in the middle of the road and return to a bad state.

Investment is a method of raising money that is in great demand these days because it can make practitioners earn large profits in the long term. Even so, the risk of investing is also quite high; therefore, for those of you who want to invest, taking advantage of compound interest is the most suitable way.

Utilizing compound interest will make the value of your investment go up faster. Conversely, the use of single interest will be good if used when you want to make a loan. You must understand one thing that can affect single interest is the term of the loan. So, you have to make sure that the term of your loan on the application of single interest will not run too long.

Investors who have plans to start investing, especially in brokerage accounts, prioritize the power of planning first, you can do that without it. These investors will also benefit from compound interest but must purchase a coupon-free bond.

A no-coupon bond does not provide interest check delivery to the investor who requests it. However, this is replaced by available bonds that are discounted to their original value and will grow over time.

How Compound Interest Works?

The notion of compound interest is interest that is calculated using a basic calculation of the initial principal. It also includes all accumulated interest from your deposits or loans in the previous period. There are many variations of compound interest and are always changing or not fixed in each period.

As a more detailed description, compound interest is a percentage of the principal amount and includes all accrued interest from the previous period. In other words, each period of interest accruing, the amount of interest added to the initial principal is calculated based on the principal plus the interest from the previous period.

Benefits of Compound Interest

Compound interest has several benefits and can be used to calculate investments. Some of them are: Can increase the amount of investment in the long term. The growth in compound interest is believed to reduce the risk of inflation and the decline in purchasing power of the general public.

Factors Affecting Compound Interest

The following are some of the factors that affect the size of compound interest:

Frequency is the number of interest payments each year and will determine how much compound interest is worth. Interest is usually paid at a predetermined time limit, for example annually, six months, quarterly or monthly.

Compound interest occurs when you set aside some money in a savings account, account for retirement money, also capital in the stock exchange, and then let the money go. When the account you have gets dividends and an interest, you are continually reinvesting those dividends, thereby generating additional income more quickly.

You can deposit funds to invest only once and the funds will grow with different on the rate of interest and periods. For example, an investment of IDR 10,000,000 with 8% interest will grow to IDR 22,080,000, and after a decade; then Rp 48,754,000 after two decades and Rp 107,652,000 after three decades.

You need to set aside money for each month; and your coffers definitely grow faster. If you set aside Rp. 100,000 per month at the age of 21 years to invest in an instrument that pays 8% interest, then at the age of 65, your funds will be worth IDR 447,000,000. Increase the deposit every month to Rp. 200,000, your money will be doubled to Rp. 893,000,000.

The higher the risk of an investment you do, so the greater of potential income you will receive and also the greater the potential loss you will experience. For instances, the account of regular saving usually offers rates with low-interest and low risk regarding loss. Besides, doing investment on stock transaction is potentially giving you rates with double-digit on investment over the long term.

Looking at the review of compound interest above, you will now know the reason why compound interest can be very strong and in great demand by investors. You can also get the same thing as long as you want to learn about it and understand the risks. Never delay to start saving and investing. Include your children to enjoy the benefits of using compound interest. In the future, they will be very grateful to you when they are your age.

We must understand that saving and investing are different. The definition of saving is saving the money you have to meet short-term needs that can be withdrawn at any time. While the notion of investment is a process of developing money whose goal is for the long term.

The basic and important keyword that distinguishes between saving and investing is the risk factor. The purpose of saving which is only used in the short term makes it a lower risk factor than investment practices.

For example, when you save using ordinary savings in the bank, you only have a small risk of losing money, but the amount of money will not increase. This is different from the practice of investing in that the profit potential is greater than the amount of money invested when starting.

But on the other hand, the practice of investing also has the potential for considerable losses. This is what makes investing riskier than saving. Let’s discuss further some of the advantages and disadvantages of investing and saving practices.

Advantage and Disadvantage of Invest

The investment target is for the long term in the period of 10 to 20 years. Investments are used to meet future needs that are still far away, such as children’s tuition fees to prepare for retirement funds. You must study carefully the types and risks of investments so that you do not lose.

Investments with low risk include mutual funds and gold. The price of gold is known to tend to rise every year, although only little by little, it remains the choice of many people to invest using this instrument. Gold is considered more suitable for long-term investment.

Another type of investment that has a very high and volatile risk is stocks. This is due to fluctuations in the stock market that always occur every day and will affect the distribution of the results of the shares owned.

Looking at the other side, investing in stocks can also provide the most aggressive and very attractive returns compared to other investment instruments. Investors must monitor the movement of stock prices at any time, the condition of the company’s shares, and also whether there are sentiments that arise.

Advantage and Disadvantage of Save

In contrast to investment, saving is generally done only to save money in preparation for an emergency if at any time you need money in a short time. Saving is done when someone already has a target amount of money to be collected, and then it will be used for a purpose shortly.

For example, use it for a vacation abroad at the end of the year and set aside money to save. The amount of money needed and the money that will be set aside every month should have been determined within a certain deadline so that there is no miscalculation.

Several types of savings can be used by the public, such as conventional savings, hajj savings, term savings, savings for children’s future, and also current accounts. There is even a type of savings that will be used for investment.

This type of savings is done by buying time deposits, in contrast to conventional savings. The difference is that there are conditions that must be met by the customer. These savings only help make it easier for people who want to invest and grow their money, in contrast to saving to save money. From now on you can set aside money to prepare for future financial conditions.

Do Not Be Rush with Financial Matters

All steps that can be used as options to achieve financial independence, such as saving or investing rely on knowledge of two related things. You have to study carefully, especially about the risks you may face. Another important thing is that you have to measure your abilities first before deciding which method to focus on.

You see if your financial condition is still more likely to save, and then save first, or you can save to be able to make investments as mentioned above, then it doesn’t matter. At least you do it based on ability and still avoid the risk of big losses. Never rush into making any decisions, especially when it comes to financial matters. Many cases tell people who are in debt because of investments; you certainly don’t want that to happen.