Last week, I ruined everyone’s Friday by dropping this truthbomb.
Seriously, if you’re in your 30s and plan to retire in your 60s, you don’t actually have many paydays left.
It’s easy to work out (if you get paid monthly). Pick your imagined retirement age, minus your age now, and multiply by 12. Because I have aggressive early retirement plans (and am kinda old), it’s an even lower number.
Yep, just over 200 times to wake up and feel rich for three days. 200 times to scour my payslip working out how much leave I have accrued. 200 times to go down Pitt St Mall feeling like a baller.
That’s not really many times at all, in the scheme of things.
And if you’re planning to take time off to raise kids, then you can minus out at least 6 of those paydays, and maybe a lot more.
So, now that we have all had a moment to face reality, let’s talk about what we do with this information.
Running the numbers
Our time in paid employment is a gift. Not just to our smashed-avocado-loving selves of today, but also to our future, chilled-AF party selves. We are all Baddie Winkle, somewhere in the future, drinking with Miley Cyrus.
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How do we do we achieve this? We take charge, that’s how. We do a mutha-effing BUDGET! Woot!
Ok I said that in an excited way because I know you’re about to hit snooze. But go with me here.
How to do a Budget that doesn’t hurt your head or induce anxiety
A budget is all about giving you data that makes you better at decision-making. And information is power! So, I recommend a combination of:
- MoneySmart’s great online budget planner (click here), which sets out all the costs you have right now. You can choose weekly, monthly or annual for each item, and it averages it all out for you.Then you can run it as a monthly, quarterly or annual budget. It even gives you a pie graph – awesome!
- MoneySmart’s TrackMySpend app (in the App store or Google Play) – record everything you spend, and I promise you shit gets real very quickly. You can just do it for a month if you like – but it gives you powerful data.
Once you have this data – a combination of ‘forecast’ and ‘actual’ numbers – you can make informed decisions. In particular:
What does it cost to be me?
- These are your fixed costs. A useful way to think about this is to have different versions – the ideal you, the average you and the bad you.
- My ideal budget is when I don’t buy three pairs of boots at the Wittner sale (they were super cheap) and don’t have Priceline accidents (when you go in for Panadol and come out with three new lipsticks). My average budget is when I actually do those things. And my bad budget is when I buy stuff I don’t need due to premenstrual angst or emotional turmoil. To be honest that version of me has been tamed these days, so I usually fall into the first two. And my latest budget has Priceline accidents built into it.
What’s a reasonable savings goal?
- There is no magic number for this. At least 10% is good, but if you have done your real budget (the average you) and there’s genuinely not enough left over, then do 5% or whatever. If you can do more, then happy days! The key is to do something.
- Also, it may not even be real savings at this point – it could be paying down bad debt like a credit card. Or, at the other end of the scale, it may be going straight into an investment like a managed fund or ETF (more on that here). In any case, it’s the money you allocate to being a responsible adult who does sensible things with your future self in mind.
And once you’ve answered these questions, you can feel more in control and less like ‘it’s all too hard’. Simples!
Belinda White is a PR specialist and finance guru. This article originally appeared on The Fierce Girls Guide to Finance, you can read it here.
