If you’re a mid-career professional, life is full of demands. You’ve worked incredibly hard to get here. You’re sandwiched between young kids and aging parents. Your job is challenging and life is busy. Be it a technology company, medical practice or your own small business, stress comes with the territory during this season of life. This is fertile ground for growing a financial mid-life crisis. With all that’s going on, it’s hard to know if you are making the right financial choices, because you don’t have time to stop and focus on the financial considerations of the moment. Understanding this, we’ve compiled a list of the 8 most important wealth builders for all of you hard-working mid-career professionals.
Saving vs. Enjoying Life?
As income increases to it’s highest point in life so far, higher spending tends to follow suit during these years. But according to a recent study by Morningstar, roughly half of people will retire earlier than expected causing savings to be much lower than anticipated. Deciding how much to save brings new challenges as bigger questions come in to focus. Things like when you really may retire, changing careers, buying a bigger home for kids, or just remodeling your current home. When entertaining life-changing transitions, taking inventory is the first step. Where have you saved to this point? How will a major life change impact the long-term picture? Weighing alternative lifestyles are ripe with complexity that only becomes clear when comparing customized planning scenarios.
What Are Your Tax Options?
Everyone loves finding more tax savings. But great tax planning is about hitting singles and doubles vs. home runs. Additionally, the best way to ensure you don’t have unwelcome surprises come tax day is to dissect your tax planning at the end of each year. Many tax saving opportunities are left on the table when other priorities dominate your time. Longer work hours, traveling, and shuttling kids to events take all our attention in our 40s. Without proper attention, you never know when potential tax savings are missed.
How Are You Invested?
When starting out, how much you are saving matters much more than the returns you can earn on those savings. But upon reaching mid-career higher earnings, your investment returns could become larger than the actual annual savings. At this point, your asset allocation moves front and center. Choosing how to divide your investments could pay off if busy lives don’t get in the way. Even an increase of 1.5%/year has a huge impact over time. As with many other things in personal finance, building wealth should be boring when doing the little things which then add up in a surprising way over time as demonstrated by Carl Richards in this graph.
It is so easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of making small improvements on a daily basis. It is only when looking back 2 or 5 or 10 years later that the value of good habits and the cost of bad ones becomes strikingly apparent.
— James Clear (@JamesClear) October 8, 2018
Estate Plans In Order?
When the mid-career attention is divided, important items get ignored. Several of these include life, disability and health insurance for your family. We all know insurance can be expensive, but not having the right kind of insurance when you need it can be detrimental. Many people set up their beneficiaries when they first set up their accounts and then forget to ever update it. Part of your estate planning is choosing a guardian for your children and ensuring that the right people are the beneficiaries of your estate. Working with a professional can assure your estate is in order regardless of any eventuality.
Outline of This Episode
- [4:27] How much should you be saving vs. enjoying life?
- [8:55] Should you buy a new home?
- [11:01] Are you saving enough?
- [13:09] What are your tax options?
- [14:35] What is your investing process?
- [19:15] Life insurance
- [21:02] Health insurance
- [22:03] Estate planning
Resources Mentioned
- BOOK – Essentialism by Greg McKeown
- Kitces.com – The Four Phases of Saving and Investing for Retirement
- Article – The Process
- Podcast #40 – Make these Financial Moves in Your 40s
- Morningstar – The Retirement Mirage
Connect With Chad and Mike
- https://www.financialsymmetry.com/podcast-archive/
- Connect on Twitter @csmithraleigh@TeamFSINC
- Follow Financial Symmetry on Facebook
