Saving Made Easy -- No Nonsense Version

Saving Made Easy (No Nonsense Version)

Kirk Holding a 28 Pound Brick of Gold

Have someone else take care of saving money for you.

Go on and live your life… be a solid citizen… party your brains out… divorce… marry ten times… be a politician… be homeless… be rich… do whatever you want to do or can do with your life. During your life you will have savings to help you do all, or any, of the above. You may even save some money for later in life… like next week.

If you have a job your company may have a savings plan. The way it usually works is that the company will take the money right from your pay without you ever seeing it and put it in a savings plan. Many companies will contribute some of their own money. You just got a raise. You are getting more money without doing a thing.

Some companies have a stock purchase plan. It usually works the same as the savings plan above but your company will buy shares for you instead of putting the money in a savings plan. If you don’t like the idea of being in the stock market just take the money out regularly and spend it or save it or (my personal favourite) spend some of it and save some of it.

If you do not work for a company with a savings plan, then check with a bank (but be careful of their “free” investment advice) to see if they can help. Sadly, the banks will not match your savings like a company will.

That’s it for the savings plan. Now for some advice from a worldly scholar… me.

Start small. I started with $25.00 per month, got laid off after only one month and had to suspend the savings program. I still retired at 53 years old.

Increase the amount you contribute in small increments over time when you find out that you do not miss the money that goes into savings.

Use at least some of your savings for things you want now. Saving for retirement is admirable but I want to live well my entire life including when I am young and when I am retired.

Kirk at the Canadian Mint in Ottawa

Comments

Tree Tinkler

In our city on Vancouver Island we still have a local newspaper. One of the regular items in the newspaper is the "Beefs and Bouquets". One of my beefs won the number 9 spot in the top 10 Beefs of the Year. I have copied it in its entirety below.

BEEF To the woman who went into the trees in our yard to tinkle. She was undoing her pants as she was running from her car to the trees so it was pretty obvious what she was up to. Does she realize she is next to a 24-storey building with a clear view of her makeshift toilet? At least I hope she was only tinkling.

Here is a link to the Newspaper’s top ten Beefs of the Year.

Quit While You are Ahead

Quit While You are Ahead / Skiers' Denial
I like to try many different things. I guess one of my biggest fears in life is that there may be something somewhere that I have not experienced. So in keeping with that thought I once took up skiing. Now this story is really not about me or even that much about skiing so feel free to skip to the next paragraph. When I did learn to ski I took lessons and practiced on small hills in the city. It was 15 minutes up the hill and 30 seconds down. It took a long time to get little practice. After a while I was ready for the mountains and what I found was that it was half an hour up and half an hour down. I learned more about skiing on my first trip down the hill in the mountains than my entire practice time in the city. Who knew? Well... I guess every skier except for me and the people who told me to learn how to ski in the city.

Many skiers I talked to told me stories and one of the common threads was the one where they had a skiing a…

Space Game

In the late seventies (yes, the 1970s) I was enrolled in an Electronics Engineering Technology program. There was some minor programming involved. I had to write my first program on ticker tape but I loved it right away. I could write some code and then watch the machines do what I asked them to do. It was just awesome.
The school had some minor games on the central computer. One of them was a space game. No one had personal computers at the time so this was brand new to me. Just picture yourself at 23 years old being able to play your first computer game. It was mesmerizing.
We did not have terminals, just teletype machines, so each move we made in the game had to be printed out. It took a lot of paper. And now we see the problem. The school shut down the computer games because of all the paper use. It was a sad, dark time indeed.
We were all quite upset so in programming class I inquired about the space game only to be told that it was not coming back. Then I asked “What…

Happy, Healthy, Wealthy

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