Great Idea, and you have a great chance of meeting your target by starting early. Definitely don't get caught up in the myth of retirement.
Someone has set up a standard game plan for everyone. It basically goes as follows:
Age 0-5: Baby – Grow Up
Age 6-17: Child – Go to School
Age 18-21: Student – Go to College
Age 22-65: Adult – Work
Age 65+: Senior Citizen – Retire and Die
What a dumb plan.
What most people really want to achieve is ‘Financial Independence’. It is not ‘Retirement’.
Retirement usually means that we are no longer dependent on work for our income and daily living needs. Our income is independent from our occupation.
So what you really want is ‘Financial Independence’ much earlier than scheduled for us in the standard game plan. In fact maybe the game plan we really want is more like:
Age 0-5: Baby – Grow Up
Age 6-17: Child – Go to School
Age 18-21: Student – Go to College
Age 22-39: Adult – Work towards Financial Independence
Age 40+: Financially Independent – Enjoy Life
So now that we have a goal of Financial Independence, we need to set a timescale to reach that by and a means of reaching that goal.
In this context we are generally talking about a savings and investment plan that will give us a sufficient amount of money to live off for the rest of our lives.
We will need to equip ourselves with the necessary knowledge and tools to make this work now.
To be successful we will need patience, discipline, and wisdom. But most importantly we need a plan.
It may prove expensive to acquire that much needed wisdom on our own. Learn by other peoples mistakes. Learn from other peoples successes. Read some books. Visit our local book store and find books that we like and feel comfortable with.
Some of the titles I have on my bookshelf include:
One Up on Wall Street by Peter Lynch
How to make money in Stocks by William J. O’Neil (Founder of Investor’s Business Daily)
The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas J Stanley and William D Danco
Check out web sites like fool.com and yahoo finance.
Investigate trading strategies with a proven track record over 3, 5, 10, and 15 years.
Pick something that we understand, find easy to use and will help us realise our goals. Pick a strategy where we can take responsibility for your investments and be in full control of our capital.
Systems like the Stocks Monthly system are definitely worth investigating once we are up to speed with the nuts and bolts of investing.
