Brian and I met with a financial advisor, Jeff Smith at Intrust Bank, today to see if we can setup a Roth IRA for Brian. As you know I’ve gotten pretty obsessive about saving for retirement of late. I don’t know what happened but over the last few years I’ve transformed from a spender to a saver. Brian and I both agree that we want to make sacrifices now to enjoy our retirement later. We want to be like John and Wilma, one of the many wonderful couples we met during our Jamaican vacation this summer. They can afford to spend several weeks throughout the year traveling because they’ve planned for retirement well. My feeling is retirement won’t be that much fun if you don’t have the money to enjoy your favorite activities. Doing the same old things every day will get pretty boring after a while, unless it is playing poker :P. And I really hope that by planning carefully for our future Brian and I won’t end up having to work in order to support our retirement income. I see old people like that now and I feel really bad for them. I don’t want to share the same fate.

I feel pretty secure about our retirement plans. I have planned my retirement pretty carefully and I am confident that Brian and I will have enough money to live on after we retire even without the help of social security. However, we are staring a retirement savings plan for Brian because we want to have some slack. We don’t want to be just surviving when we retire. We want to enjoy. Besides that, since we don’t plan to have any children, we have to think about what we will do past the early stages of retirement. The fancy nursing homes are pretty expensive. We want to make sure we have enough saved up to afford to stay in one of the nicer ones; some of them are like resorts nowadays. Once we are too old to travel, we might as well live in a nursing home that is a lot like a resort environment.

As always, there is a plan B. If we end up not saving enough, we can always go back to the Philippines and retire there. If we retire there, then our dollars will buy us more and will last longer. Don’t ask me why I am fixated on this stuff now. I have at least 30 years ahead of me. I guess it could be that since I’m turning 30 next month, I feel like having some sort of retirement plan is paramount. And it is. It’s never too early to start saving for retirement.

Another thing tha people often take for granted is insurance. Paying for insurance is like a catch 22. On one hand you are paying for something that you might never use so that in the event that you need it you are covered. You don’t really benefit from it unless something bad happens and you have to file a claim, but at the same time you don’t really want a catastrophe either just so you can get your money’s worth. It’s something you buy but hope you never have to use.

Anyway, since it is something that you won’t really need unless an emergency comes up it’s very important to make good choices. Let’s take car insurance as an example. It isn’t always best to go with the cheapest. You should compare car insurance and see how satisfied their current customers are. If you have the cheapest rates, but when it comes time to file a claim they give you a lot of hassle and don’t want to pay out then it’s really not worth it. You want to go with someone you can trust. Choose a company that will deliver when the time comes.

The same goes for home insurance. This is something that one shouldn’t take lightly. One again, you hope never to have to use it but it doesn’t hurt to be covered. Planning for retirement and having insurance or some sort of contingency plan in case of disaster are two very important things when planning for your future.