Achieving the financial freedom to retire early a dream for most. Making that dream a reality isn’t as tricky as it sounds. The secret is simple: Save a lot more each month. Sounds easy, right? Not so fast.
The typical rule of thumb given by financial planners is to have a goal of saving up to 20% of total earnings. But if you want to retire when you’re younger, that percentage will probably need to be more like 40% to 50% of your income. Of course, that’s not so simple since a big part of your paycheck goes to day-to-day, necessary expenses. So if you want to save that much, you need to make some serious lifestyle adjustments. It requires making changes, but it’s doable.
A relatively new movement called Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE) has been developed around this “sacrifice and over-save now to retire early” concept. FIRE followers develop strict savings programs (up to 75% of income) and make associated sacrifices like living in small apartments, walking to work every day, restrictive diets, and so on. This path may be too restrictive for many, but the mindset offers some takeaways that might be worth considering.
The first point is to adhere to the key principles of long-term investing, including developing a diversified portfolio that includes stocks with various styles, sizes, sectors and regions.
You may be able to accelerate your potential retirement earnings by consciously seeking higher returns (and also accepting more risk) in your investment portfolio. But whatever your risk tolerance, your portfolio must be diversified to protect against extreme market movements that could jeopardize your early retirement objective. You can choose from a number of ways to allocate investments to diversify your portfolio, and these should be informed by your individual goals, growth and income needs, appetite for risk, and age.
After accelerating your savings and setting up an ongoing plan, invest your savings into your portfolio at the earliest opportunity. Try not to attempt to time the market. Stay put, and let the compounding characteristics of the markets do its work to help grow your retirement wealth exponentially over time.
Astute investors pick retirement growth stocks with low beta, strong earnings estimates, positive sales growth, and expected future growth.
The Zacks Rank regularly identifies attractive growth stocks ideal for retirement investing. Here are just a few that might be worth consideration: Community Trust Bancorp (CTBI), Cambridge (CATC) and AbbVie (ABBV). These are top-ranked stocks, with at least 5% earnings and sales growth over the past five years, and boast beta equal to or lower than 1.
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