Creative Ways To Save For Retirement

Most people aren’t saving enough for their retirement. Saving the recommend 15% of your income is a challenge, but it is needed. Luckily, there are ways to boost your savings for retirement so you can put aside more cash for the future. Saving more retirement doesn’t have to be hard. Try some of these creative options to increase your savings without much sacrifice on your part. 

Increase Your Automatic Contributions

Automating your retirement savings is a great way to save enough for your retirement. You can do this by having your 401(k) contributions taken directly from your paycheck pr by setting up an automatic transfer on payday to an IRA. 

When you make your contributions automatically, you don’t have to force yourself to transfer your money into savings. Boosting your savings can be easy. Add a small increase to how much you save every six months. For example, if you currently save 6% of your income, increase this to 6.3% or 6.5%, and so on. 

Keep making slight increases to your automatic contributions every few months until you find you can’t manage on the cash you have left. If you do this gradually, you won’t feel like you’re living on much less money, as you can gradually adjust to the lower amount of cash leftover. 

Do this bit by bit until you find you don’t have enough left to live comfortably, then pull back a little bit and keep your savings at that rate. 

Bank Your Raises

When you get a boost to your salary, the extra money often just seems to get absorbed into your bank account and you don’t often notice much of an improvement to the quality of your life. If this happens to you, you’re experiencing lifestyle inflation, which happens frequently when salaries increase. 

Instead of expanding your expenses to match your increased income, make those pay boosts work for you by automatically increasing your retirement account contributions to match the raise. 

If your salary went up by 2% this year, increase your retirement contributions by 2% before you have a chance to get used to having the extra money. You won’t miss it if you never get used to having it and it can provide you with a nice nest egg for your senior years.

Use Your Bonuses To Boost Your Retirement Savings

Did you get a bonus at work or work overtime? Transfer the extra money from this straight into your retirement savings. 

You don’t need to spend the bonus money as it isn’t part of your usual monthly income. Surprise extra cash can be used to help secure your future and is the best use of the money rather than splurging on something that won’t improve your financial security in the long term. 

Fund Your Retirement Savings With Coupons

Printable coupons, coupons from the newspaper, and online codes can all save you a lot of money on purchases you were going to make anyway, such as on groceries. 

When you save money by using a coupon, transfer the money into your savings right away. You transfer the money straight into your IRA, or you can put it into a savings account and then move it to your retirement account when you have a few hundred saved up. 

Turn Cash Gifts Into Retirement Savings

If you are given cash for your birthday or another special occasion, you might be tempted to spend the money. Instead, turn it into something more valuable by investing in your future. 

If you want to enjoy some of your gift, commit to keeping half of every cash gift, and transferring half into your retirement savings. You could also choose to move the whole amount into your IRA. 

Gifts, like bonuses, are surprise cash that you don’t need to meet your regular expenses, so why not use them to invest in your future?

Make Good Use Of Tax Refunds

A lot of people get tax refunds, and if you’re lucky enough to get one, use this refunded cash for your retirement. You can contribute a large chunk of money to your savings if you save the whole amount, but you might also be able to score some tax breaks to help you get a bigger refund in the future. 

Get A Side Hustle

If you’re struggling to save enough for your retirement from your regular paycheck, think about getting a side hustle and devote most or all of that extra cash to your retirement savings. 

Side hustles are easy to find, thanks to the gig economy. You could do anything from delivering food to walking dogs, or turning to investing, such as learning to invest in precious metals with Accuplan. 

Whatever you do for extra money, contribute the whole amount to your retirements savings. You can easily max out an IRA by earning a few hundred extra dollars a month, which will set you up for being a senior. 

Optimize Your Accounts

Investing in the right account can help you to save more for your retirement, either by improving your interest rate or helping you get tax breaks. 

If you’re putting money into a savings account, make sure it is a high-yield account that pays out the maximum amount of interest. Bank the interest and transfer it to your retirement savings. 

Make sure your retirement funds are invested in accounts that offer tax breaks. This could be an IRA such as the Vanguard SEP IRA account or something like 4019k)s. One account that most people forget about is a health savings account or an HSA.

HSAs let you save pre-tax money for the cost of healthcare, and to take out money without paying taxes on the withdrawals if you use the funds for healthcare expenses. Healthcare is one of the biggest costs that seniors have, so saving money in an HSA is a great way to make sure you have enough money in later life. 

You can take money out of a health savings account for any other reason too without incurring penalties after you have turned 65, so these can make good general accounts too. Just make sure you qualify and have an eligible high-deductible healthcare plan.