We're all trying to set aside money, and retirement is likely one of our biggest financial undertakings — but in this post, I'm talking not just about retirement, I’m talking about saving for the FUTURE. You know, when people are cruising around in flying cars, teleportation is totally a thing, and we’ll all have the ability to live forever. The FUTURE is going to be cool, and no one knows exactly what will happen, but I can tell you one thing — it's going to be expensive.
We love to blame our economic self-depreciation on the myth of the starving artist, romanticizing the penniless demise of cultural figures like Edgar Allan Poe or Mozart. But I'm now considering whether the art form that inspired this knee-jerk aversion to money can be found even closer to home.
Named for the savvy Delaware Senator who in 1997 dreamed up a simple twist in the tax code to create something truly worth shouting about — the Roth IRA is one of the most powerful tools regular people have to get ahead.
Yes, the brilliant switcheroo that Senator William V. Roth Jr. made was to take the traditional upfront tax break we're used to getting with our retirement savings, and instead put it on the back end. What this did was allow most people to pay less tax initially, and then to NEVER pay tax on that money again — offering the peace of mind to know that your growing balance will be all yours (and not the IRS's) when the time comes to make withdrawals.
For Insight's maiden blog post, I'm going to declare myself a super fan of the creative, do-it-your-own-way weirdo. I'm talking about you — the person that doesn't fit into the box of traditional employment, who's making their thing their way because they simply have to. You know who you are. Your work is delightful, unexpected, needed, new, or therapeutic — crafted from your hands, your ideas, or your unique perspective. And maybe, just maybe, you've been so busy realizing your vision that you've pushed money to the back burner. That's where I can help.
A few years ago, I was giving a talk to a group of MFA students at Columbia College in Chicago about the right moves artists can make with their money, and a student surprised me with the question, “But what if you just want to dance?”
Huh? It took me a second — but then I understood he was really asking, when is it okay to be impulsive?
