Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Some Help For Thinking of the Future

You're young, healthy, and busy, and the future, the far future, is way, way down the road. Yup, I was just 21 yesterday--the future is closer than you think. Planning for that future requires starting now. There's a useful tool available online that can answer some questions about just what you might need in those far away years and what you need to do now to prepare for them. There is also an interesting feature on the site that allows you to compare the cost of living across two different cities--no more guessing and arguing about if OOT can be cheaper or not--look for yourself.

http://cgi.money.cnn.com/tools/retirementneed/retirementneed_plain.html

2 comments:

ShanaMaidel said...

There is a lot of data out there that saving enough for retirement is not an innately easy behavior- you cannot easily guess what you will need. Nor invest it well at the right times in your life. It would be better to structure a plan to be opt-out rather than opt-in as a result, and to be very portable, and easy to understand. (Most are not)

You're a professor- why not move with other professors for an auto-deduct program (with opt-out rather than opt in) for work-study on your campus, in some sort of invested account for the student (even if it is just cds- that it doesn't ever break the buck.)

See Nudge for details.

Ezzie said...

Unfortunately such sites are not typically applicable for Orthodox Jews... hence the Jewish Economics Survey I'm conducting. :)