With back to school in full swing around here, I have been thinking a lot about how to make day to day life easier, making less decisions on the fly and creating successful systems within our household. My thoughts often turn to what I can automate, like paying bills, grocery orders or meal services.
Some of these automation ideas can actually be applied to our financial lives as well. Today I want to give you a few ideas on that. I heard a quote recently and it said, "automation is solving the problem once and then putting it on autopilot." So who doesn't want to solve a problem one time and then be done with it rather than have the same problem recurring over and over again?
So, Jonathan, let's discuss a couple ways that people can consider automating good behaviors in their financial life that can help them become a 401k superhero to their future self. The first and most obvious one that I would bring up, and really, really important is contributing to your 401k so that each and every paycheck you have an automatic contribution going and being saved for your future self.
Another one that we've seen a lot and we've been talking to a lot of participants about is a lot of record keepers allow you to set up auto increase automatically yourself, right where you can go in and increase that 1% every year. Sometimes even 2% every year. That's been a big hit and I love talking about that.
Another one that doesn't even have anything to do with the 401k, but is just as important is automating emergency savings. Each and every paycheck, even if it's taking 25, 50, maybe even a hundred bucks, and automatically transferring it into an emergency account. So, if an unexpected need for cash pops up, you've got a little a bucket of money sitting there ready for it. That's a great way to automate your emergency savings window.
You know, another great one that we talk to people about is automating by using target date funds. People understand how target date funds work and how they automatically de-risk as you get closer to the target date. Once you can automate your increases and your investments, those things are a great way to get on track for retirement for sure.
If you guys are looking for help automating some of these things related to your financial life, click on the link below. Schedule time with a member of our superhero team. We can weigh in and help you make good decisions that solve a problem one time, so that doesn't keep coming up time and time again.
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