And there’s so much else that requires money now—like paying your monthly living expenses, or your student loans and credit card debt, or maybe your mortgage.

But putting money away regularly for retirement, even if it’s a small amount at first, can really pay off over time.

Saving with Stash’s retirement calculator

Check out Stash’s new retirement calculator, which will help you determine how much you might need to save each month to reach your retirement goals.

Getting started is easy:

Step 1. Learn about your options.

Not everyone has an employer-sponsored 401(k) plan to help them save for retirement.

But that’s okay! Stash Retire allows you to sign up for a either a traditional or Roth Individual Retirement Account (IRA), which will let you put up to $6,000 away annually. Individuals who are 50 or older are eligible for catch up contributions, which entitles them to put an extra $1,000 away every year.

Good to know: You can contribute to both an IRA and a 401(k), as long as you don’t go beyond the contribution limits for both during the calendar year.

Learn the difference between a 401(k) and an IRA here.

Step 2. Set it up.

Because you’ll be building your nest egg for years, you’ll want to make sure your portfolio has the right mix of investments, and one that suits your individual level of risk. Some investors like more risk and will load up on stocks and stock funds. Others like less risk, and might have more cash and bonds.

But whether you like more risk or less, you should always aim to diversify. In fact, diversification is part of the Stash Way. By diversifying,  you’ll hold a variety of investments that are not all subject to the same market risks, including stocks, bonds, cash, and commodities.

You’ll also be choosing investments in numerous economic sectors—not just the hot industry of the moment—as well as in different geographies around the globe. We offer exchange-traded funds (ETFs) which can help make diversification easy.

Confused? Don’t worry, when you set up a retirement account on Stash, we recommend funds for you based on how many years you have until you stop working.

Special note: All investing involves risk, and it’s possible to lose money by investing in stocks, bonds, and other securities. Find out more about investment risk here.

Step 3. Automate it.

An easy way to grow your retirement fund is to automate your savings. If you’ve budgeted properly, you should know how much money you have to save and invest each month.

Consider putting a portion of your savings into investments, and invest consistently over time. Any number of online tools will help you do that automatically.

Stash lets you automate saving and investing with its Auto-Stash tools.

Stash on!

The best time to start saving for retirement is today.

You don’t need a lot of money to start investing. Stash lets you start investing for just $5.

The post Got Retirement Goals? Stash Can Help You Get There appeared first on Stash Learn.

The average American is likely to spend roughly $1,000 during the holiday season—by no means a small amount for many people. And for some, it’s an insurmountable sum. As of November 2018, 15% of Americans were still trying to pay off debt accrued from the previous holiday season.

Whether holiday cheer has blinded your financial judgment, or you simply didn’t budget for Secret Santa and stocking stuffers, odds are your bank account took a hit over the past month or two.

But if you find yourself in debt or are possibly reeling financially from the holiday season, there are some things you can do to get back on track. Even if you’ve racked up some credit card debt or blown your budget, you should pick yourself up off the mat and get ready for another year.

Get back on track, by tracking your spending

If your bank account balance is giving you an anxiety attack, you may need to go on a zero-spending streak to avoid going into debt. Buy groceries and pay rent and other fixed expenses, but if you can, put off non-essential expenses until after the next paycheck or two.

You may want to try another method to keep your spending under control, such as going on a “cash diet,  which involves using only cash for every transaction, until you feel comfortable going back to your debit card.

Repad your accounts

If your savings took a hit during the holidays, it’s time to replenish these accounts—namely, any rainy-day or emergency savings funds you’ve built up.

It’s vital to have money in reserve for all of the financial curve balls that life can throw at you. There are some expenses you can cut, and other ways to increase your income, which can help you rebuild your funds.

Repair your credit

If you were one of the many Americans who went into debt over the holidays, don’t panic—you can pay it down and repair any damage to your credit score.

Even if you can’t pay off your credit card in one fell swoop, you should be able to keep your score up by making regular payments. The trick, however, is to make sure you’re tackling your debt in a timely manner, and making more than just the minimum payments, as interest can set you even further back over time.

And avoid additional spending on credit as the new year commences.

Budget for next year

The time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, and the second-best time is right now.

Apply that same logic to next year’s holiday shopping spree, and plan ahead. So start budgeting money now for all the gifts, decorations, and anything else you want to buy when the next holiday season rolls around.

Calculate how much you spent this year, anticipate what you’ll need next year, and start stashing money away each month so that when Santa comes knocking, you’ll be ready.

The post Holiday Hangover: Stash’s Post-Holiday Financial Recovery Guide appeared first on Stash Learn.

Maybe it was to get to the gym more often or to eat more salads. Or perhaps you told yourself you’d put down your phone more often and read more books.

A lot of people make financial resolutions, but they crash and burn by February.

Jean Chatzky*, the host of “Her Money” podcast and the Financial Editor at the Today show, teaches us how to make better promises to ourselves and make New Year’s resolutions without dropping the ball.

The following are excerpts from Chatzky’s recent conversation with Stash editorial director Lindsay Goldwert, edited for clarity.

1. Rethink “resolutions.”

“Resolutions are fraught with difficulty because it is so hard to keep them. Research shows many many people end up abandoning their resolutions by mid-February. And so whatever type of resolution you’re going to make… it’s important to not set the bar so high that you are going to fail, and then beat yourself up about it.”

2. To stick to your resolutions, look at the pros and cons.

“If people can get themselves to a point where they see more pros than cons to changing the particular habit, then the likelihood that they’re going to succeed goes way up. If you’re thinking, ‘I want to save more money this year,’ the pro to that is I’ll feel more financially secure. The con is that you’re not going to be able to do things that you’re used to doing because you’re not going to have as much money to spend.

You have to get yourself to a place where you can see the upside more than the downside. And I actually like going really old school, and writing it down on a legal pad to weigh your arguments.”

3. Become a better goal-setter.

“Goals should be specific. They should be tangible, and they should have a time limit.

Why do you want to save more money—are you saving for something specific? Are we talking about a down payment for a house or a car? Are we talking about a vacation or retirement? Whatever your goal is, you should try to attach a number [dollar-figure] to it.”

4. Break bigger goals down into smaller, easier achievements.

“Let’s say you want to go on a trip and you know it’s going to cost $2,000. You want to take that trip six months from now. You’ve got a lot of information that you need to benchmark your way to reaching that goal.

Take the six months and divide that into the $2,000…and you figure you need to save, say, $400 per month in order to reach your goal. And that’s a little less than $100 a week.”

5. If paying down debt is your goal, a little extra can make a big difference.

“Making additional payments, or paying a little extra [on top of the minimum amount due] every single month—whether it’s a credit card or a student loan—can make a huge amount of difference in the time it takes to get you out of debt.

A mortgage is a really good example of this. If you make one extra payment each year on a 30-year fixed-rate loan, it cuts the term of that mortgage down to about 24 years. So it saves you six years of interest just by making one extra payment each year.”

6. The first step toward reaching your goals? Save more.

“Save—save more, and do it automatically. We are a society of chronic under-savers. But that’s not 100% our fault. The system has changed around us over the last couple of decades to the point where we are much more responsible for our financial futures than any generation that came before us. We have no choice but to save a lot of money for our future, and the very best way to do that is to set it on autopilot.”

7. Try to save at least 15% of your income—but take baby steps.

“If you’ve been listening to the financial experts on the planet, like me, you know we like to say you got to save 15% [of your income]. And there’s a reason for that. If you save 15% of your earning consistently over the course of your career, you should have enough to retire on.

The problem is if you are starting at zero and you try to get yourself to save 15%, it’s [similar to] a crash diet, and you absolutely are going to implode. So, start at 2% and do that for a few months. And then bump it up, and bump it up again and bump it up when you get a raise, and bump it up when you have a birthday.

Just don’t try to go all in because it’s really, really hard for human beings to do that.”

8. Buddy up.

“If you’re trying to reach a financial goal, find an accountability buddy that you can tell what’s going on and ask them to hold your feet to the fire and offer to do the same for them. [For example], I’ve got a running partner. We started running together when our sons were about six months old, and they were both in baby joggers. Today, those six-month-olds are 24 years old.

We’ve been running together for that long, and some days I can’t make it, and some days she can’t make it. But we arrange to meet on a corner near the woods [regardless]. We’re going to show up.”

The post Own New Year’s With These Resolution Tips From a Financial Expert appeared first on Stash Learn.

But Lowry turned her financial situation around using a variety of tips, tricks, and adopting a disciplined approach to her money.

And now Lowry is sharing her advice for other broke millennials our podcast “Teach Me How to Money,” including these seven tips for young adults looking to get their finances in order.

The following are excerpts from Lowry’s recent conversation with Stash editorial director Lindsay Goldwert, edited for clarity.

1. Keep going with your financial goals

Money is not black and white. I’m not a math person. You never had to be good at math in order to be good at money. I hate that idea of, ‘Oh, I’m not good at math, so I can’t handle money well.’

False.

I think it’s also that I completely acknowledge that you’re going to trip up, you’re going to fail. I have failed multiple times trying to reach financial goals. It’s just reset and keep going.

2. Planning a wedding? Lie.

Fun tip. Sad and sexist, but true: If you’re in a heterosexual relationship and getting married, put the man on the phone to call [event companies], and say you’re planning a family gathering. (You’ll probably get a better deal.)

3. Financial planning in your 20s can be a nightmare. Roll with it.

Our lifestyles are really in flux in our 20s. What worked for you at 21 might not work for you at 29, because your life has changed, and hopefully, your salary has changed a lot, debts have probably changed, hopefully down, but you never know. Things happen. Sometimes, we get so anchored to this one style that we’re not flexible in realizing we need to change.

4. Try The Cash Diet

The “cash diet” is the juice diet of the financial world, and it’s the first thing I encourage people to do. The “cash diet” means only carrying cash, and making all purchases in cash.

Read more: What’s the cash diet?

Especially in the day and age of digital, a lot of people are like, ‘Oh, I can’t do that. Everything I spend is online.’ I love coupling it with something I call the Tracking Every Penny Method. That is, every single time you make a purchase, you write down how much you spent. More importantly, what you spent it on.

The cash diet has been proven to reduce how much you spend, because the physical action of handing cash over sets something off in your brain, where it’s like, “Oh, I don’t want to part with this.”

5. Trigger warning!

Acknowledge and identify what’s triggering you [to spend]. That can be really hard to do.

For me, if I get really upset and stressed about something and then there’s this one bakery in my neighborhood that makes the most amazing brownie, and sometimes that is my, ‘Oh, I’m going to buy a $3.50 brownie.’

Now, it’s not good for my waistline or necessarily my budget to do that consistently.

6. Need to improve your credit score? Pay off your credit cards.

I’m a big advocate of paying off your credit card balance on time and in full. There’s never, ever a need to carry a balance on your credit card from month to month. That is one of the worst myths that are out there. People hear that all the time, in order to build your credit score, you have to carry a balance. I’ve spoken to a lot of experts and a lot of credit bureaus and credit scoring model companies. You absolutely do not have to carry a balance [to improve your credit]. Just pay off your bill in full.

7. Can’t get yourself to save for retirement? Try this one simple trick.

For anyone who feels [unmotivated] to save, I have a really quirky recommendation. Find an ‘aging’ app. You put in a picture of yourself today, and it will age you 50 years. Sounds ridiculous. There is a study out from UCLA that found that if people see an aged photo of themselves, they’re more likely to connect with the future version of themselves, and it will motivate [them] to save and prepare for [retirement].

The post 7 Money Tips For Broke Millennials, From a Broke Millennial appeared first on Stash Learn.

Get $100 in your Stash Invest account

when you refinance your student loans with LendKey*

Joe Dawkins knew he’d have to take out student loans to pay for college. But he saw the bright side: grant money put the cost of his top choice, a small private school in Boston, on par with the in-state option closer to home.

In 2006, the then 17-year-old took out a few government loans as well as one from one of the nation’s largest private lenders—a three-year loan that didn’t require a parent to cosign.

Eager to get out on his own, Dawkins wasn’t thinking about what he’d owe. “This was going to get me to school, to that good job that would help me pay for things later on,” he says.

But during his junior year, the loan company said they weren’t able to finance his final year at his original low rate: “They would give me the loan on the condition that my interest rate would be hiked to 14.5 percent,” he says. In “panic mode,” Dawkins acquiesced: “Just one more year,” he thought. “I’ll deal with [the consequences] later.”

Paying off student loan debt has become its own right of passage, often trickier than obtaining that advanced degree in the first place: The average college graduate enters the workforce today owing $37,172. When Dawkins moved to Southern California with his new bachelor of arts degree in communications, he owed close to triple that: about $110,000.

Drowning in debt, making bad choices

At first, Dawkins felt lucky. In a down economy, he landed a job as an executive assistant for a healthcare company. But six months after he got his diploma, the monthly bills for his student loans arrived, asking for $950 a month—almost $200 more than his monthly rent payment.

Essentially, he was working merely to pay for his education, and he began questioning the utility of his degree. He began wondering whether teaching would be a better fit—something he’d thought about years ago. Then he became convinced it was his dream career. Those student loan statements were, he says,  “a constant reminder: ‘You made a bad choice.’”

So he began to ignore them, or, “pay a little, and then stop, and then pay a little more after a few months,” he says. But there was no escape: “They would call every hour on the hour, from different numbers, saying ‘we need the money.'”

Coming up with a repayment plan, with expert help

Eventually, Watkins got real: If he wanted the phone to stop ringing—and to start building a future—he was going to have to take action. So he reached out to a someone who has made a career out of helping families navigate the educational loan system: Jodi Okun, the founder of College Financial Aid Advisors.

Okun was direct about what Watkins really owed—and that there was no magic bullet that would make the debt go away. She understood Watkins’s shame; his biggest mistake, however, was not paying. “He’s a smart man, but deep down, emotionally, he thought, ‘Maybe there is another way around it,” says Okun.

They agreed going for a teaching certification was the best next step for Watkins—even if it would mean more loans. But Okun advised him to hold off until he paid off some of the interest charges that he had racked up so that he could start chipping away at the loan principal.

Negotiating with his lender

Back in good standing with his lender, Watkins approached his lender and asked to renegotiate the size of his monthly payments, based on proof of his income. “I took the first number they gave me—$712 a month—as it was doable,” he says. “I think the more proactive you are, the more receptive they are in the end.”

In 2015, Dawkins enrolled in a short teacher’s certification program that was less time and money (about $10k) than a lot of the other, more traditional master’s degree programs. When it was over, he signed up for loan auto-payments, which take the money out of his bank account before he can even think about spending it.

This year Dawkins is celebrating his 30th birthday, planning his wedding, and preparing for his first year teaching eighth graders. Though he still has close to $100,000 in student loan debt, he has an entirely different handle on the situation: “I’m in a school district that pays really well; I’m earning more money and paying off smaller loans, I am hoping to be paid off in the next 10 years.”

No regrets

Dawkins has no regrets, he says, other than his lack of financial literacy at the start. “Still, there’s time,” he says. What helped Dawkins the most was having someone explain to him about student loans, that it’s something you have and it doesn’t go away.

The post Paying Off $100k in Student Loans: This College Grad Is Doing It appeared first on Stash Learn.