The
decisions I’ve outlined above spanned about 60 years of my life. Some of them seemed like simple decisions at
the time, but they may have had long-term consequences. I can’t think of any major financial
decisions I made that turned out badly, and if I had my life to live over, I
don’t think I would have changed any of them
But of
course those decisions were all made in the context of my own life. For someone else the decisions may be
entirely different and the decision for you may be even the opposite of what I
chose.
Perhaps you
are younger and don’t work for a company who offers a defined-benefit pension
but you instead have a defined-contribution pension (which is like a 401K that
the company contributes to – thus you assume the risk of any investment
decisions, and the company has no long-term obligations to you). But since people these days are more and more
mobile and they do not stay with the same company for most of their working
life (as I did), having this type of defined-contribution pension that you can
take with you can be very beneficial.
Other people
may have additional things to consider – such as college loans (much bigger
than the relatively small one I had), two incomes (in the above I chose to
ignore the much smaller income that my wife had as a preschool teacher in a
private Christian preschool), or larger/smaller families. But the general principles that I’ve outlines
could still be a good starting point.
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