Mid-Career Financial Journey
Momentum is one word you’d like to use to describe your mid-career financial journey.
You may already have a retirement plan or savings strategy, an education savings plan for your children, and maybe you bought a house (a real estate investment). You may also have some investments on the side in a brokerage account.
As a mid-career professional in your field, you may be focused on building your career and raising your family. Helping to ensure your financial journey goes according to plan means covering (usually with insurance) those interests that are important to you today (family, mortgage, your income) and building toward your goals tomorrow.
How financially literate are you compared to the average American? You can take one of the shortest of those financial literacy quizzes here (it’s only 6 questions) to get a taste of the questions asked.
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Are You Making Deductions Without Instructions?
You may be deducting money from your paycheck automatically, putting your money on a long term mission. But, here’s the question: are you making paycheck deductions without instructions?
Do you know how much you should be contributing each paycheck, each month, each year to reach your financial goals on time? You should be asking questions about what you’re doing as a long term repetitive financial actions. If you’re not navigating your financial journey accurately, you might find yourself way off course when it’s too late to take corrective action.
Your mid-career working years are important. They are the hard-working engine stage of your financial life when you can accumulate the bulk of the money you’ve identified you’ll need for your goals. It’s the only time of your life when you have lots of time for your money to work for you, a paycheck to cover monthly bills, and growing assets you don’t need to use (yet).
Mid-Career Financial Planning Financial Journey
Given the significant resources you’re building toward those important goals, getting periodic financial advice may go a long way to helping you keep on target, on time, efficiently. Your home buying does not come with financial advice. Your employer’s retirement plan does not come with financial advice. Your life insurance policy does not come with financial advice. These are one-time financial transactions, generally, without ongoing advice.
Are you getting the financial advice you need to help you get where you want to go?
Quick, Easy Financial Self-Checkup
Here’s an easy way to know if you’re navigating retirement properly: do you know the date you may have enough money to retire?
If you don’t know that date, this is the strongest indication you haven’t done the financial calculations to know that date. And, if you don’t have a retirement date, how do you know how much you’re supposed to be saving each paycheck toward retirement to get there?
You can ask the same questions about your child’s education funding, the amount of life insurance coverage you have, or any other financial goal you’ve set. Money doesn’t come with instructions. You need to seek out instructions.
DIY: There’s Plenty of Financial Information Online
There are plenty of financial resources available online. The challenge is to do enough precise research so you’re comfortable you understand your financial options. The risk, of course, is you’re doing this for yourself and this likely means you’re a first-timer, more likely to make a costly first-timer mistake.
Online Research Cannot Compete With Practice Experience
The other option is to find a financial advisor and use that advisor’s knowledge and experience as your advantage–just as if you owned a boat but hired a seasoned captain to navigate through challenging waters instead of trying to do so yourself.
The captain might have navigated those waters in different types of weather many times in the past in many different ships for many different types of passengers. The captain has practical knowledge and experience you cannot obtain through online research, regardless of the amount of research you do online.
Paycheck Deductions Without Instructions?
Other than at enrollment, your employer’s retirement plan does not come with long term instructions or a financial advisor to help you. That’s because the financial advisor works for the plan (your employer), not for you.
You will likely meet that financial advisor during your first day at work (or soon thereafter). The purpose of that meeting will be to help you enroll in the employer’s plan, to determine your general tolerance level for investment risk, and to choose investments based on your risk profile. But that may be the last time you see that financial advisor–ever.
Will you be on track to retire? Will you understand your investments when you look at your account? Are you missing any opportunities? You will need to make an effort to find answers to all of these questions because they may not be forthcoming automatically through the employer’s plan.
That’s one example of a major and very common financial decision that may not provide all of the help you need. You could easily land up making paycheck deductions toward your retirement account without instructions for many, many years. You may never be able to retire that way. That’s why financial planning needs to be part of your financial life.
You will work hard to earn your money. The question is this: will your money work as hard for you as you work for it? The same way you have a supervisor to help you do your job well, your money needs supervision to do its job well.
Takeaway
Mid-career is the wealth-growing engine stage of your financial journey. If you’re going to put your money on a mission, have a mission for your money.