“Max out your 401k”
“Max out your IRA”
“Max out your HSA”
I’m sick of hearing that, and you should be sick of it too!
They say doing all those things will have you retired comfortably by 65, but what they don’t tell you is that you have to start doing that in your early 20’s.
If you haven’t been doing that since your 20s, that strategy will only keep you working long into your 70s chasing a comfortable retirement.
That’s NOT how life is meant to be. You should NOT be living to work.
In fact, you shouldn’t even be working to live, because you could be using this retirement hack to be able to live the way you want in retirement.
The retirement hack I’m proposing involves investing in yourself for yourself.
If you choose to put your money in a 401k, it might grow 5% a year if you’re lucky.
BUT you can’t touch any of that money until you’re 65 (unless you want to pay a penalty on it).
And the worst part is, you’re entrusting your hard-earned money in the hands of somebody who doesn’t care about you or the way you want to live.
It’s time to take your future back into your own hands.
Start off by creating an ideal portfolio that you can dip into any time you’d like (penalty- free!).
M1 Finance is a good tool for doing this, as you can create a “pie” and divide up your investments by percentages, but you can also use any broker you like.
Consider putting 15% of your fund in gold (GLD) and 15% in bonds (TLT).
Now, you have 70% left to do with as you please.
Park 50% of it into some big-name, safer stocks (APPL, GOOG, etc.)… I’m talking about the stocks that won’t be going anywhere for a long time.
Doing this will automatically beat that standard and boring 5% through a 401k, AND you can pull cash out whenever you need it.
Now, here’s where you really speed up that retirement.
Use that remaining 20% and find a high paying dividend stock.
A healthy dividend stock will pay 8-10%, but you can find some that go as high as 20%!
Make sure the dividend is reinvesting automatically – your broker will be able to help you set this up.
Now you’ve got a portfolio of stability, growth, and retirement-worthy that you can dip into whenever you please!
If you’ve got enough coming in from that dividend, you might find you can retire immediately and just let that money build up.
So forget about the 401k, IRA, and social security. Take ahold of your retirement with this simple hack.
