Ethos Finance

Setting Yourself Up for Good Retirement Years

Many people have the wrong idea about retirement. Having a good life at these years is not something that happens automatically, and you have to fight for it throughout your active working life. It also takes a bit of planning – especially if you want to start relaxing at a younger age than most other people on the job market. The sad reality is that we’re seeing a rise in the average retirement age in many parts of the world, and that’s not a good trend.

Those who fail to plan accordingly risk getting left behind, and no support system will be enough to help them out at that stage. If you want to avoid dealing with this, you have to start out early, and have a determined attitude about it.

Start Planning Now

And that’s the most important thing in this ordeal. Start planning as early as possible, and have a rough roadmap for your career over the next decades. In many lines of work, jumping between positions can be more lucrative than trying to get promoted in the same company over and over again. This is especially true for software development and other areas of the IT sector. As long as you keep learning and adding quality points to your resume, you’ll be in a strong position to bargain for more money at your new jobs.

You should also prepare for any courses that you might want to take along the way, especially advanced certifications that might be important for climbing up the career ladder in your line of work. A common reason people fail to move up in time is because they lack the right credentials, but it can be difficult to obtain them on short notice in most of these cases.

How Much Can You Save?

Have a realistic outlook on your saving capabilities as well. Different people can afford to put away different sums of money, but you should not be limiting yourself with your main income from your day job. There are plenty of ways to get some extra money saved up along the way, and you should start exploring those opportunities as early as possible.

On that note, try to think about any expenses that you might be able to cut out as well. There’s often a lot happening in your daily life that impacts your finances but can be avoided with some careful planning. If you do this often enough, it will become a habit sooner or later and will allow you to have a much more relaxed life in the future.

Diversifying

There are also some more exciting options on that front, such as investing and even trying to start your own business. These can have a huge long-term potential to create a fantastic retirement situation for you, but they should also be approached carefully. If you don’t know what you’re doing, investing in the wrong places can be a significant drain on your finances, and can put you in an even worse situation later on. If you’re serious about this and want to give it a try, set some money aside and talk to an expert about how you can best utilize it on the market.

Dealing with Sudden Expenses

No matter how well you might have planned things, there will always be certain sudden expenses along the way that you can never predict. Whilst short term lenders such as Omacl.co.uk can usually assist in these matters, you should try to account for those in your retirement calculations as best as possible, and leave some fields in your budget for that purpose. The exact amounts will depend on many factors – your age and health, whether you have a significant other, children, car, pets, etc.

And while you obviously can’t predict every single thing that can happen to you, setting aside a few hundred dollars each month for that reason alone is never a bad idea. You’ll mostly never have to use that money, and you’re free to carry it over to your next month’s savings or spend it in another way if you want to. Just make sure that you have that sum available for the next month as well.

Keep Up with the Trends

The financial market keeps changing at a very rapid pace, especially in fields connected to technology. Just take a look at cryptocurrencies – it can be very difficult to keep up with them all. This can have a huge impact on your retirement planning. You have to stay flexible, and be ready to jump ship if a certain idea suddenly becomes less attractive. Some investment options and other plans might not work out, and you have to avoid becoming overinvested if you want to stay afloat.

After all, we’re talking about a period of several decades. Take a look at the market’s development in just the last decade and you’ll realize that it’s impossible to survive with a rigid platform.

Posted in Retirement | Tagged Budeting, Finances, Loans, Retirement | Comments Off

Protecting Your Finances in a Digital Age

More and more of our financial assets re moving to the cloud nowadays. It’s hard to avoid that in some cases, especially if you live in a developed country. And with this strong push to digitalize everything, some people have started to fall behind the times, and as a result have felt the impact financially.

Security is an especially tricky issue that’s important to get a grip on as early as possible. There are many aspects to modern digital security, and it’s no longer something that’s optional to learn. It’s critical if you want to protect your finances and a large number of them are online in some form. That said, here are some tips to get you on the right track. Note that this list is far from complete, but it will at least help you sort out some of the most common problems people tend to have with their own digital security.

Good Password Discipline

Failing to follow reasonable password rules is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. It’s not just about setting a strong password once. You have to avoid reusing any of your old passwords whenever you sign up for a new account. In some cases, it might be a good idea to rotate your passwords on a regular basis to ensure that no saved credentials can be reused.

And needless to say, you should never write any of those codes down or store them in otherwise accessible locations. You’d be surprised how many people get compromised in this exact manner, and it looks like no amount of education is going to prevent some from doing it.

Have Alerts for Everything

It’s easy to set up alerts for many types of your accounts and services these days, and it’s a good idea to do it as early as possible. From your e-mail to your bank account, you should be notified as soon as something is out of the ordinary. Using two-factor authentication on top of that is a good way to ensure that hackers will have a hard time getting into your accounts. They will need to break into multiple devices instead of just one.

Of course, these alerts won’t be of much use if you don’t pay enough attention to them, so check regularly. If you get a notification about an attempt to login to a service that requires 2FA, don’t just ignore it – this means someone has access to at least one of your passwords already!

Be Wary of Scams

Scams are everywhere in the digital world these days, and you should have an untrusting attitude if you want to get by safely. Many of these scams will be designed to compromise your credentials and hit you where it really hurts – your money. Phishing is a good example of this. It’s a class of attacks that attempt to imitate the design of a popular website – such as your online banking – in order to steal your credentials for it.

Understand the Underlying Technology

Considering how much you probably use the internet and how interconnected everything in your life is these days, there’s hardly any excuse for remaining ignorant about the way it works. You should at least understand the fundamental underlying principles behind your smartphone, your computer, and some of the most popular services that you use on a daily basis.

This is especially true with things like online banking and e-commerce sites. If you don’t have at least a basic understanding of the corresponding technology, you risk falling for some of the most common scams on the market.

Be Suspicious by Default

In the end, you’ll realize that the only sensible way to combine money and the internet is to maintain a suspicious attitude about everything. The unfortunate truth is that many people out there are out to scam you, and this has ruined a good number of free – and even paid – services. But on the bright side, as long as you keep that in your head at all times, you can simplify a lot in your life.

You don’t even have to be asked directly for any credentials or bank account details in order to fall for a scam. Simply revealing the wrong details about yourself to the wrong stranger can sometimes be enough to land you in a lot of trouble in this digital age, when people are able to connect dots that you don’t even know exist. With that in mind, try to keep all of your accounts as separated as possible. Use separate e-mails for important accounts (like your bank and payment ones), and never reuse passwords between any of the services that you’re signed up for.

Posted in Budgeting | Tagged Budgeting, Finance, Loans, Money | Comments Off