Sometimes Being an Adult Sucks (kinda gaming related, all finances)

[mrstickball]

Tanstalas said:

vlad321 said:
I had this in an edit but you ebat me to it so I'll jsut say it here:

The way I ensured some safty, and my retirement, is by putting $50 a month at a very young age in a mutual fund, the ones with very low returns but that skyrocket exponentially with time. Other than that, I have enjoyed my life by going abroad to interesting places almost every year (this year is the first in a long long time where I am stuck in the US for the whole year) and what else I have goes to making my domestic life more fun. My account is also happily growing and at around 35 I might even stop putting new money in it since it just won't matter.

I don't know how i is for a later age, but just throw small amounts of money in there, but do it religiously, and you should be fine. By the way, the lipstick industry is the most stable industry and is literally depression-proof.

Not to sound like an ass, because saving money IS a good thing, however, at only $50 a month, you will be eating dog food at retirement age :)

If you put in $50 a month from the time you were 15 until 65 (retirement age) you would have a shade less than 400,000 saved if you were getting an 8% annual return, which is a pretty safe assumption.  

I don't think that would be enough to retire on.

I'm also confused with your "skyrocket exponentially with time" comment?  Are you talking about compound interest?  

You are somewhat correct about $400k not being enough to retire on. Assuming you'd get 8% APY from that $400k, you'd get about $32,000 to life off of.

However, I'd imagine that at some point, you'd be able to save back slightly more than $50/mo, to get a much higher amount of money.

And the money would 'skyrocket exponentially with time' due to compound interest. It certainly has a nice curve to it at 8% APY + $50/mo. What is scary is that with an extra 1.6% APY, you'd earn an additional $244,000 when you turn 65. If it was 12% (which is around the actual average for mutual funds and such in the US), you'd have just under $2m USD by the time you retired at age 65.