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Is It Really Possible to Invest When Broke?

March 9, 2020 By MelissaB Leave a Comment

Investing is the best way to grow your wealth.  You can watch your money grow thanks to the compounding power of interest and dividends.  Especially if you start investing at a young age, say your teens or twenties, the power of time is on your side and you will increase your money much more rapidly than someone who begins investing in their 40s or 50s.  But if you’re just starting out or have debt, you may wonder, is it really possible to invest when broke?

Is It Really Possible to Invest When You're Broke?

The answer is, yes, it’s completely possible, though you may start investing with less money and in a less conventional way than other individuals who are investing.  Remember, every little bit helps!

Is It Really Possible to Invest When Broke?

Should you be investing at all if you have debt or if you don’t have an emergency fund or extra money each month?  Yes, you should, but feel free to invest in a smaller way.  Consider some of these options:

Take Advantage of a Company Match

The first place to start investing is in your company’s retirement plan.  This is an even smarter option if your company matches your contribution.

Is It Really Possible to Invest When You're Broke?
Photo by Allef Vinicius on Unsplash

When I started my first full-time job in my 20s, I was broke.  Flat out broke.  And my company automatically withdrew 8% of my paycheck every paycheck to put in the state retirement system.  There was nothing I could do to stop this investment, and trust me, I would have if I could have.

But, I’m so glad I couldn’t!  My company also matched the mandatory 8%, so I was investing 16% of my salary in my retirement.  When I left that job 10 years later, I walked away with an impressive start to my retirement, thanks in large part to the company match.

Use Acorns

Another easy way to invest is with an investing app.  Acorns is a microsaving app that takes the discipline out of investing.  You connect the app to your checking and credit card accounts.  Every time you make a purchase, Acorns rounds up, and the difference is invested.

You can also choose the option to boost your round ups by up to 10x.  So, if you make a purchase for $4.60, normally, 40 cents would be invested.  However, if you boost that amount by 10x, Acorns will invest $4.40 for you.

There are over three million people currently using this app, which is a great way to start investing even if you’re very young, say still in college, and don’t have a full-time job.

How to Learn More About Investing

Once you start investing, you may want to know more and invest more.  If you’d like to learn more about investing, there are several low-cost classes such as Udemy’s Investing in Stocks: The Complete Course.  This 11-hour course is currently $14.99.  If you’d like a free option, Morningstar offers a free investment class that includes 170 lessons!

Is It Really Possible to Invest When You're Broke?
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Final Thoughts

The best time to invest is now, especially if you’re young.  But even if you’re not, it’s never too late to start investing.  Your future self will be so glad that you did!

MelissaB
MelissaB

Melissa is a writer and virtual assistant. She earned her Master’s from Southern Illinois University, and her Bachelor’s in English from the University of Michigan. When she’s not working, you can find her homeschooling her kids, reading a good book, or cooking. She resides in New York, where she loves the natural beauty of the area.

www.momsplans.com/

Filed Under: Investing Tagged With: 401k, Investing, Retirement

There Is No Ideal Time to Contribute to Retirement

February 16, 2015 By MelissaB 6 Comments

“Do you really think you should be voluntarily putting money into your retirement account?  It just seems like there are so many other things you could be using the money for right now.  Why don’t you wait to contribute to your retirement until you get more financially stable?”

Recently, I was lamenting our financial situation to a good friend.  I just had a dental procedure at a periodontist, I was just told my 6 year old has 8 cavities (that’s another story) that will cost $400 out of pocket to fill, and that my 10.5 year old will need braces to the tune of $5,000 or so.

Add on top of that the fact that our car has 150,000 miles on it, and we refuse to borrow for a new one, and well, I’m looking at a lot of financial stress.

Still, these expenses don’t have to be paid immediately.  I’m saving money every month for a new-to-us car when our old one finally gives out.  I may be able to wait a bit to get my son braces.

I just wanted to vent a bit to my friend and express my frustration.

I was really surprised by her answer.  She simply couldn’t understand why we would contribute to our retirement when we have so many impending expenses.

Yet, as Tracy Chapman sings, “If not now, then when?”

Good Time to Contribute to RetirementThere’s no good time to save for retirement.

You could always use the money for something else.

When my husband and I were newly married 14 years ago, I made a little over $30,000 a year.  We lived in the suburbs of Chicago, which wasn’t cheap.  My husband was a graduate student and didn’t work.  We were flat out broke.

And my employer had a mandatory rule that 8% of my gross income would go to my retirement savings.

I HATED that rule.  There were so many other things that I could have used that money for, but I had no choice.

Eleven years later, when I left the job and walked away with 11 years of retirement savings at 8% of my gross salary plus an equal match by my employer, I was ecstatic that I was forced to save for retirement.

Now, my husband is working for an employer who has the same rule, and we’re happy that 8% of his gross salary goes to his retirement account.

We’ve learned our lesson so well, in fact, we are also contributing to our Roth IRA even though money right now is T-I-G-H-T.

But really, for most Americans, money is almost always tight.

I would rather scrimp and save now, while we still have many working years left before retirement than scrimp and save during retirement, constantly worrying if I had enough money to last me until the end of my life.

So, no, my well-intentioned friend, I don’t think I should stop contributing to my retirement.  In fact, there’s no better time than now to save for retirement.

If not now, then when?

Do you continue to contribute to your retirement when facing large expenses, or do you wait to contribute until your finances improve?

MelissaB
MelissaB

Melissa is a writer and virtual assistant. She earned her Master’s from Southern Illinois University, and her Bachelor’s in English from the University of Michigan. When she’s not working, you can find her homeschooling her kids, reading a good book, or cooking. She resides in New York, where she loves the natural beauty of the area.

www.momsplans.com/

Filed Under: budget, Retirement, ShareMe Tagged With: 401k, Investing, ira, Retirement

Why I’m Withdrawing Money from an IRA

March 1, 2013 By Shane Ede 15 Comments

I’ve been going back and forth with myself over whether I should write a post about how I am withdrawing money from an IRA.  It’s not something that is recommended, and certainly not something that most people who write personal finance blogs talks about.  In fact, it’s somewhat embarrassing that I am doing it at all.  And, I had decided that I might not talk about it.  Until I saw this post on my friend Sandy’s blog, Yes, I am Cheap.  For those of you who won’t click through the link, I’ll give you the quick rundown.  One of Sandy’s readers lost her job a while back.  Since then, the reader has used all of her savings to pay bills, and her unemployment status is in a sort of limbo.  The reader has 21k in her 401(k), and she asked if she should take that money out to help pay the bills until she can find work.

What that post did for me, and the reason that I’m writing this post, is remind me that I’m not an island in the personal finance ocean.  When I started this blog, I didn’t have a 401(k), or really even know what one was.  I was up to my eyeballs in debt, and contemplating bankruptcy.  As I searched the internet for information about that and other personal finance related topics, I decided that I wanted to share what I was learning, in an effort to help others who might be in a similar situation.  Sometimes, when writing post after post, here, I forget that I’m not the only one who has the same questions, or who is in the same situation.  There are other people who’s circumstances might make them cringe when bills show up at the door.  It’s for those people that I write here and share here.  And it’s for those people that I am writing this post.  I think this may be the longest introduction to a post I’ve ever written. 🙂  Let’s get on with it, shall we?

Withdrawing money from an IRAThose of you who are regular readers will recall that I quit my job in November of 2011.  It was a decision that I had been coming to  for many months, and a decision whose timetable was advanced by several situations at that job.  All of those situations made it very unhealthy for me to be there anymore.  So, I quit.  I didn’t do much planning, and hadn’t done much saving.  I had to quickly cancel the mortgage paperwork we had been trying to push through as we wouldn’t be able to afford the house we had been planning to buy.  All in all, it wasn’t the greatest idea, financially.  Emotionally and mentally, it was the best idea I’d had in a long time.

Why I needed to withdraw from an IRA

I then spent about 7 months working part time while trying to rapidly build my blogs, here and elsewhere, to a point where they might sustain my without having to get another full time job.  I didn’t succeed.  And I ran out of savings about a week and a half after I had taken a new full time job.  It’s a good job, and I enjoy it quite a bit.  But, it doesn’t pay nearly as much as my other job had.  When I started there, our finances were still bleeding.  They continued to as we continued to try and make ends meet.

Sometime last fall, it became apparent that the ends were going to begin to not meet.  If you’ve ever been there, you know that looking forward to a month where you might have to decide which bills to go delinquent on isn’t a very comfortable spot to be in.  It became very apparent, after several hours going over our budget, that we had a cash flow issue.  Too much going out, not enough going in.  The problem wasn’t with discretionary spending, however, although we did find some places to cut there too.  The problem was that we had too many payments taking up too much money.  If we wanted to survive, financially, we needed to find a cash flow solution.

I should say that it wasn’t an easy decision to tap into my IRA.  At  the time, I’d only recently rolled my 401(k) from my old job into it, so I’d just taken a hit by doing that.  But, I needed a way to create some cash flow, and an infusion of money would do it.  So, I called my adviser and had him issue a check for the amount I needed.

It’s my money.

There will surely be a few naysayers who come upon this post.  Most of them will tell me (and you) that what I did was a terrible thing to do.  That I’ve permanently set myself back for retirement, and that there had to be other ways to accomplish the same thing.  But, there weren’t.  Trust me when I say that I know my finances.

Yes, it will set my retirement saving back by quite a bit.  Yes, I’ll have to save more in the future to achieve any sort of retirement nest egg.  I know all that.  But, I feel that remaining current on my bills, and not having to potentially declare bankruptcy is more important than that.

There’s also a rebellious part of me that would like to just say that it’s my money and I’ll do with it what I want. 😉  In all honesty, it is my money.  Just so much as the money in your IRA or 401(k) is your money.  And, in my opinion, our money is only worth anything when it is improving our situation.  My situation needed improving now, not in 40 years.  (not that it likely won’t need improving then too)

Using the withdrawal from my IRA

For those of you who are thinking to yourselves that if I made a withdrawal from my IRA, it’s ok for you to do it too, just stop.  This was a last ditch effort to stop us from going into delinquency on several accounts.  Would it have bankrupted us eventually?  Maybe.  I’ll never know, and I didn’t want to find out.  But, what I will tell you is it took a good deal of thought to make the decision, and it took a good deal of determination to use the money properly when I did get it.

When the check arrived, I cashed it and went to the casino.

Just kidding!  Ya’ll were looking so dang serious!  I deposited it.  Directly into our checking account.  During the decision process, I’d taken a full audit of our bills each month and determined the ones we would need to, and could, eliminate in order to get ourselves back on the right track.  So, even before I asked for the withdrawal from my IRA, I had a list of the things that I was going to pay off.  Over the next several weeks, as those bills came in, I send them payment in full.  Until all but one of them was completely paid off.  The one remaining was a bonus bill.  I didn’t have enough to pay it off in full, but was hoping that I could get them to negotiate the amount down.  I wasn’t able to.  So we still have that payment.  But, once it was done, we eliminated several hundred dollars worth of monthly payments.  More importantly, we cut our monthly payments by enough that we have enough each month to pay the remaining bills while still having enough left over to pay a bit extra. We’re on the right track again, and making strides to keep it that way.

Would you withdraw from your IRA?

There are only a handful of reasons that most people will tell you that making a withdrawal from an IRA is a good idea.  Most of them involve exemptions from the tax penalty.  Would you ever take a withdrawal from your IRA?  In my situation?  In any situation?

 

 

 

 

Shane Ede

I started this blog to share what I know and what I was learning about personal finance. Along the way I’ve met and found many blogging friends. Please feel free to connect with me on the Beating Broke accounts: Twitter and Facebook.

You can also connect with me personally at Novelnaut, Thatedeguy, Shane Ede, and my personal Twitter.

www.beatingbroke.com

Filed Under: budget, Debt Reduction, Financial Mistakes, Frugality, Retirement, Saving, ShareMe Tagged With: 401k, ira, IRA withdrawal, Retirement

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