Better Financial Health in 15 Minutes (or less!)

Time Is Your Best Investment: How Early Saving Creates Future Options

• Stacey Hyde

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Ever felt paralyzed by not knowing exactly what financial goals to set for your future? You're not alone. This episode tackles the common dilemma many young professionals face: how to save for a future you can't yet envision.

Drawing from personal experience, I share how my husband and I discovered our love for Colorado's mountains later in life – a passion we couldn't have predicted in our twenties. Had we waited until identifying this specific goal before saving, our mountain property dream would have remained permanently out of reach. The lesson? Start saving now, even without specific targets.

The episode reveals what I consider the ultimate saving hack: when you receive significant pay increases early in your career, resist dramatically changing your lifestyle. Make reasonable upgrades to safety and reliability, but otherwise maintain modest living standards and invest the difference. This approach creates remarkable financial flexibility by your 50s – options like early retirement, vacation homes, helping your children financially, or pursuing passions you haven't yet discovered.

We also explore smarter consumption decisions, like our choice to rent boats occasionally rather than purchase one despite owning "everything for a boat except the boat." Having savings gives you the luxury of thoughtful consideration rather than impulsive decisions. Plus, financial security significantly reduces relationship tensions, as money ranks as the number one source of conflict among couples.

Time truly is your greatest investment ally – the power of compound interest over decades makes starting early crucial. Don't let uncertainty about specific goals prevent you from saving. Begin now, invest consistently, and create options for a future self you haven't even met yet.

Envision Financial Planning. 5100 Poplar Avenue, Suite 2428, Memphis, TN 38137. (901) 422-7526. This communication is strictly intended for individuals residing in the United States. Advisory Services offered through Envision Financial Planning, a Registered Investment Adviser.

Speaker 1:

Hi, I'm Stacey Hyde and I'm back for another episode of Better Financial Health in 15 Minutes or Less. And let's get real here there's been kind of a month or so that we haven't posted and part of the reason was I was out in Colorado enjoying the cooler weather out there. But it made me think about goals and about how, especially when you're younger, you know, just getting out of school or just starting your family, like thinking about retirement and what your goals should be, can be really hard because you don't know what you're going to be doing next year, much less 30 years from now. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't start setting money aside. But, as I've said on here before, not everything you save for should necessarily be in a retirement account, because those retirement accounts have rules you have to be 59 and a half to get money out without a penalty, all of those types of things which they're great and there's huge benefits. We'll talk more about other subjects in the one big ditaful bill on our next episode, but I wanted to talk about that and because it did make me think about goals and because it did make me think about goals when I was starting my career, I had never I'd been to Colorado once. But as I got older and my kids got older and my husband and I started doing different things, we discovered that we loved the Mountain West and so that became one of our goals was to own property out in Colorado. But had we not and quite frankly that would have never occurred to us early on because we we would go on beach trips. We did take our kids skiing when they were younger, but we'd never been out there in the summertime, and so if we had waited to save for that until after we decided that that was a goal of ours, we never would have been able to do it.

Speaker 1:

But early on we were diligent savers, really tried to live within our means, and a real hack to doing that and I share this with my daughter and the children of clients that we work with the real key to being a sort of a magnificent saver is when you start out your career you're usually not making a ton of money. But then if you really get in there and you start working hard and you work somewhere where they recognize you for what you do, you probably get some pretty big pay increases pretty quickly If you can maybe raise your standard of living a little bit. If you're not in the safest neighborhood, maybe move to a little bit safer neighborhood, maybe get a little more reliable car, but beyond that you don't really change what you do. And you start saving that money and setting it aside and investing it not just putting it in a savings account, earning, you know, maybe 4%, but actually investing it and letting it grow. Then, by the time you get to be old, like me in your middle 50s you have options. There's things that you can do. We work with a lot of people. The thing they want to do is leave the workforce early so it can open that as an option. Force early, so it can open that as an option. It can be like us wanting a second home. It could be helping your children buy their first home. It can be anything that you don't know now that. But by being diligent, setting that money aside, saving and investing it, you give yourself options. It also means that as you're going through, there'll be things that you may think, oh, I kind of want that. But then you look at it and you're like, but really, are we going to have time For us?

Speaker 1:

The big purchase that we really thought hard about but ultimately said no to and oh, thank God we did was buying a boat. We literally own everything for a boat except the boat. But guess what? We can rent a boat. It doesn't cost that much money. But if we bought a boat, it would cost a ton of money, there's lots of costs associated with it, it would cost a ton of money, there's lots of costs associated with it, and we wouldn't have used it very much. And so we, thankfully, made the decision not to buy the boat.

Speaker 1:

It could be anything. For some people that's a motorcycle. For some people, for a lot of people, it's an RV. You know, really, look at, is that something that I can rent and use and see if it's going to be something that we really, really want? For us, we kept going out to Colorado and we rented a place, and we really spent a week and then a couple of weeks and figured out, well, we really want to be here and we built a community there as well, and so for us, that became a yes, we really want to be here and we built a community there as well, and so for us, that became a yes, we absolutely want to do this On paper. Does it make great financial sense. It does, okay, I mean, if we continue to get appreciation, yes, but it's more about a lifestyle choice.

Speaker 1:

And that's the thing about goals is you are saving just generally and then, as you go on, things get specific. You know, another thing that comes up for a lot of people is we decided we wanted our children to go to private school for middle and high school. That was not an inexpensive choice and we didn't know that that was going to be a goal. We kind of thought it might be, but we made the choice to send them to public school for elementary. Save the money that we would have spent and that funded their college and that was a good goal for us and that was something that was more immediate, that we could really see and kind of had a pretty good idea that was going to be a goal.

Speaker 1:

So I think sometimes we get caught up in I don't know what my goals are, so therefore I'm not going to save. That's really the wrong approach. You really need to save generally because it's going to give you options and even if there is nothing big that you want to do, it can allow you to maybe make different career choices. It can give you peace of mind. The number one thing couples fight about is money. And if money is not an issue, if there's good savings, things are set aside, that's not going to cause issues with you and your partner. So you don't have to know what your goals are to start saving for them. The goal can just be saving as its own goal, because it has lots of virtues. And boy, if you've ever used a financial calculator and looked at the value of compounding over time, I promise you you will want to start as early as possible, because time is your best investment. Thanks for tuning in. This has been another episode of Better Financial Health in 15 Minutes or Less.