Description: The article is about merrill edge. The author gives his views about saving money for education and retirement. He thinks that it is never too late to save money for your future,he recommends saving money for your future from now.
I’m your host Frank Mallicoat,I am good to have you with us. We’ve got a great show for you. We have a filmmaker dealing with racial inequality,he is a representative from one of our historic state parks and the director of a Latino nonprofit. First,I will do a little self promoting.
If you would like to connect with us,we’d love to hear from you,you can go to CBS SF.com,you can click on connect and you’ll get all the information links to our email and social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Are you a parent out there trying to save and get your child through college? Our guest has some helpful tips,she’s the senior vice president of Merrill edge.
We are going to talk off camera. It’s a tough time for people,it’s making your job a little challenging. It is indeed. Merrill edge does a semi-annual survey of the mass affluent consumer which is defined as those consumers with between 50,000 and 250,000 in investable assets.
We’ve completed a survey. What we found is that education continues to be one of the primary concerns of this segment of the population along with retirement. Let’s talk about education because it is the topic that people are dipping into.
They hope to use it later in life to help their kids through college and tuition. The tuition are skyrocketing,the UC systems has gone up 40 percent for the last four or five years. What can a parent do for tuition?
The UC system last year alone went up 40 percent,last year UC schools went up 21%,it’s getting more and more daunting,isn’t it? It kills me,I have a Regents check in my scrapbook,each quarter was 240 bucks,my room aboard was 200 bucks a month.
I was bartending and waiting tables and paying for that. What do parents do? If you’ve got two or three kids,how do you stock it away and not dive into that when times are tough? Kids are graduating with debt of over $28,000 from college debt alone,sixty-one percent of our respondents said that they planed to dip into their personal savings account in order to pay for their children’s education.
The problem that you have is that you’ve stated is real. What do they do about it? The most important thing is to start early. Even if you didn’t get started early,it’s still not too late,it is never too early and never too late,we’re playing together.
We’re talking about education. The minute you have a child,you should start thinking about that eighteen years later this little boy or girl is going to go to college. You should open an account for them even if it’s ten dollars a month,you can do that as much as you can afford.
Don’t do it alone. You can ask your your family,your relatives to get involved,there are websites that you can go to. There is the gift of Education.com,the gift of Education.com will let you register your accounts online and let your family members do an automatic deposit into those accounts,it’s great for gift-giving for birthdays,holidays on religious events.
I read a book called the latte,it is also called the automatic millionaire,have you read about it? Do you know the latte factor? Do you know what that is? You spend four or five bucks on a coffee drink in a muffin every day,if you’re twenty-two and save that money a day,over time you will make over a million dollars.
That’s right. Today we have many types of vehicles. When you look at the special accounts that have been designed for education,you can see five to nine accounts. They give you some tax benefits that you may be able to partake in that,it will let even more money go to education,the important thing is that you need to start a discipline of an investing and you need to stick with it.
It’s a discipline around investing. You should pay yourself first.You need to take a couple of bucks back,my sister does that,she takes 200 bucks out of every paycheck and puts it into account and forgets about it.That’s very important.
That is about the retirement question. Our employers allow us in many cases to take deductions directly from our paycheck into retirement plans and in some cases,they’ll even do matching on those funds. when you’re thinking of saving the it for retirement or for education,you should take advantage of what is already set up for you.
It is the very best way to get started. You should start now,it will never be too late. There are even some advantages at that point where you can do some catch-up contributions,it’s never too late.