5 important investing moves every women should make before 40
If you’ve arrived at your 30’s and still haven’t invested as much as you think you should have by now, you might not be as far behind as you think. According to a Morning Consult report, around 61% of adults didn’t start saving for retirement until their 30’s.
Even if you wait until your early 30’s to start saving for retirement, you still have roughly 30 years to build your retirement savings.
If you wait much longer than that however, investing becomes much harder because you lose out on years to grow your money using compound interest.
If you’ve passed 40, you can still save enough to retire but you want to start as soon as possible.
Here are 5 important investing steps to make before you turn 35:
1. Build your Emergency Fund in an HSA
Having an emergency fund is important for several reasons.
First, it can help you avoid having to sell your investments at a loss if you need to use the money for an unexpected expense.
Second, having an emergency fund can give you peace of mind and help you avoid going into debt if you face a financial setback.
HYSA’s (High Yield Savings Accounts) are a great place to hold your emergency fund because you’ll typically get a better return on your money than big banks can offer.
2. Start Investing as Soon As Possible (even if you have some low-interest debt)
Waiting to start investing until you're completely out of debt can be a mistake and you could miss out on opportunities to grow your wealth and take advantage of compound interest.
Knowing that the stock market historically returns 10% on average (not every year but on average over time), it doesn’t make sense mathematically to pay off every piece of low interest debt before you start investing.
You might save some money on interest, but oftentimes you will end up better off investing that money than trying to pay off low interest debt faster.
In contrast, if you have debt over 7%, that’s likely debt you’ll want to pay off before investing too much, otherwise you’ll rack up more debt in interest than potential gains you could get in the stock market.
3. Optimize Your 401(k) For Growth
If you have a 401(k), you are an investor. Making sure you are making the most of your 401(k) is a great way to build more wealth.
There are a few ways to make the most of your 401(k).
First, the average American will spend $138,000 in fees in their 401(k). This much money in fees can actually increase your retirement age by years.
To reduce your fees, you can learn how to invest in lower fee investments such as index funds. Index funds have great benefits including lower expense ratios (which is just the operation cost of any fund you invest in) and allow you to keep more of your money. Index funds also often perform just as good or better than funds actively managed by money managers.
Another way to reduce fees is to consider rolling over old 401(k)’s. If you’re investing in your 30’s, you likely have at least one old 401(k). Leaving your 401(k) with your previous employer results in you paying administrative fees that you don’t have to be paying.
You can easily get rid of administrative fees in your 401(k) by rolling over the account to an IRA (individual retirement account) and there are completely free services, such as Capitalize that will help you do this quickly and easily, rather than to your new employer’s 401(k), that will also likely have administrative fees
If you want to learn more, grab your free 401(K) checklist to keep more of your 401(k) money for you!
4. Contribute to an IRA
Contributing to your own retirement account such as a traditional IRA or Roth IRA can be a great way to grow your wealth in addition to your own 401(k).
The main benefit of all retirement accounts is that they allow you to save big on taxes, which helps you save more for retirement than you would be able to on your own in a standard taxable brokerage account.
A Roth IRA can be a particularly good option for those that want to get their tax obligations out of the way before retirement. While there isn’t any tax benefit when you contribute your money to a Roth IRA today, once it’s in there it grows tax free, meaning that you don’t have to pay taxes on gains and you won’t be taxed when you take your money out once you’re over 59 ½.
You can open a Roth IRA on your own without an employer through any bank, brokerage, mutual fund or insurance company, and you can invest your retirement money in stocks, bonds, mutual funds, exchange-traded funds and other investments.
5. Continuing to Educate Yourself
If you want to secure your financial future, the best way to do that is to make sure you continue to educate yourself.
Books, online beginner investing courses, and podcasts make it easy to learn everything you need to learn in an affordable way.
Learning on your own is critical because you can’t assume a partner will take care of your finances for you. This isn't a trust issue. This is a preparation issue because we never know what will happen in the future.
You also shouldn’t hire a financial advisor without learning the basics on your own. Not all financial advisors are bad, but you need to learn the basics yourself so you can ensure you are still in control of your hard earned money.
If you’re ready to learn more don’t miss the free beginner investing workshop coming up! Learn more here.
