Investing in your future

If you only invest from the age of 20-30, you would have a bigger retirement than if you invest from 30-70. This is the magic of compounding interest.  It is pretty amazing but the great fact is that it goes beyond your investing for your financial future and it can be applied to everything you do in life.

When you save for your retirement, you do not want to put it off this same rule applies to reaching your goals. Stop putting off action to reach them and start today.

It is hard to start investing for many people because there never seems to be enough money. How can a 100 dollars a month do anything for us? This is the same way we see our own future. How can a spare 15 minutes help us achieve our dreams? We would need a day, a week or a month to truly make a difference. If you are alive and breathing, you know that blocking off a month to just focus on what you want to do is near impossible. If you want to do it, you can find a way but that is a different story.

Consider this. If you invest just 15 minutes a day in a year’s time you would have over 90 hours in towards reaching your goal. Just like investing in your retirement, it is not so much how much you invest but the fact that you invest something. You need to make an effort to do it.

If you invest consistently, you will get a greater return on your investment. Consider the example before. If you just invest 15 minutes every other day, you would only have 45 hours invested. You would be half as close to your goal.

Make it a priority to not only invest in your retirement but to invest in reaching your goals. Everyone has things that come up and something that goes wrong. At the end of the day, the choice lies with you. Will you invest or will you not. Your circumstances are not an excuse.

Every month, I have money drawn from my paycheck to be invested into my retirement. I never see it so I never miss it. Apply this lesson to reaching your goals by making it a habit. Always set time aside to focus on reaching your goal.

In every investment, you get something in return. It may not be the return that you want but you will always get something back. If you invested in Google, Coca-Cola and Enron, you would have dramatically different outcomes in pure financial terms but you would still gain something from all of them. When you invested in Google, you found something that worked well and out-performed; Coca-Cola was stable and returned expected results, nothing crazy. Enron, you learned what not to invest in. Not necessarily what industry to not invest in but what to watch out for in investing. This is like your life and how you choose to invest your time. We worry about making the best choice, when all we have to do is make a choice. If you did not invest any money with any of the organizations you would still have your money but you lost all the potential to grow.