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Where You Are...
Living under a rock would have been the only thing preventing you from noticing what the stock market has done of late. The stock market, like so many other things financial, is inexplicably tied to you somehow. You may not think so, but you might be surprised. Although from a long term stand point, this is of little concern.
Perhaps you have a pension where you work. A 401(k) or a 403(b) might be you investment vehicle of choice. You may have purchased an IRA of one sort or another. You are planning your retirement based on the ability of the investments you made helping to fund your after work years. And this is why the stock market news of late has caught your eye. Your future is at stake!
But not a cause for concern. Right?
It's time for some basics. A little review of what and why you do what you do and are who you are. You are the type of person who doesn't want to be called blue collar. You want to be different. You would like to be rich. Heck, I'd like to be rich also, but that isn't going to happen. And I'll tell you why.
Being who you are, an average wage earner trying to make ends meet is an incredibly difficult task. You struggle with the day to day expense of surviving, while trying to plan for an uncertain future. You try hard to live well without living broke. You try not to confuse living well with living beyond your means.
One of the great joys that the wife and I share is the family gatherings at our house. The kids come from all over the Northwest and when they do, we break bread, or whatever goofy diet they are ascribing to at the moment. Inevitably, the conversation turns to their growing years, and how we fooled them into believing they weren't poor. We scraped and cornered everywhere we could to make those ends touch. We incurred debt and we eventually got out of it. And they never even knew. We didn't do things we couldn't afford, trying to divert their attention to something less spendy.
They survived just fine, and have grown up pretending that they aren't poor either by living mostly within their own means. What I am trying to say here is simply: living large translates into living beyond what you can afford. This is the first and foremost BlueCollarDollar basic.
The creation of debt to satisfy urges will defeat everything that you think you are trying to achieve. I know I beat that drum a lot, but the common sense notion of spending only what you have, and not what you don't should be printed on every credit card like the warning label on a cigarette pack.
Now back to what you are trying to achieve.
Realistically, you won't retire a millionaire. You won't because chances are you have started late. Buying a house and having kids may have come before you had spent years in the work force accumulating some savings and maybe even wealth. You struggled through those lean years and you will no doubt tell your kids how hard it really was. You still working and probably will for quite some time. You will work longer than your parents did, and probably save about as much, percentage wise. That will not be enough to sit back and kick it on the beaches that have white sand. But you can come close.
The BlueCollarDollar does not in any way want to paint a doom and gloom picture of the future. To me, and to many readers of this site, the future can be better than and brighter than it looks. BCD readers practice patience and have the foresight to know that time is their friend. It used to be that at age forty, you were looking at the downside of a career. Not so anymore. It used to be that at age fifty, you were counting the years, months, days. At age sixty, you could almost taste it.
But the BCD reader knows that this is not the way it is anymore. We will live longer because we have decided that being healthy is cheaper than being sickly. And living longer means that we will have to amass larger and larger nest eggs to last into those longer years of retirement. Or, we should just plan on working,
I've talked about this before. Now is the time that you should be cultivating something you enjoy doing. Now is the time to begin the search for your alternate career. The one that will keep your brain busy (proven to stave off Alzeheimer's) and a paycheck arriving (proven to stave off poverty and moving back in with the kids). I t could be anything. You know what you like to do. Whatever it is will keep you healthier in the long run, and it could be a long run indeed.
Okay, we've discussed some basics. Living within your means and staying out of debt and developing a new career for retirement are incredibly important to the BlueCollarDollar lifestyle. But there's more.
Okay. So you are living within your means and now it is time to start doing a little saving. But where?
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