What’s your employer match for you 401k? that 15% saving should be the savings after your employer match. So if you have that, you might be able actually sacrificing less than 15% of take home pay to save fore retirement.
I’d have to look it up. My company actually just changed the entire system to help out younger employees - but with the effect of hurting employees who have worked here longer. So it actually ends up being harder for me to save up. They acknowledged this, but argued it off as not affecting that many people. (Not many people - just the folks who stuck around the longest!)
The explanation we were given, though, was that 15% came before the matching. So I should take every $100 I earn and stick $15 into my retirement fund. Then, of course, I’d need to put some into healthcare, some into taxes, and some into basic costs of living. Then, when I’m done, I might be lucky enough to have a shiny penny left over. Unless I have any unforeseen expenses in which case I’d go deep into debt.
I think that advice makes sense. Ideally put away more than 15% of your gross income if possible, but I think the general advice is that you should be saving 15% of your gross income every year. Whether part of that 15% of gross comes from employer match or directly from you doesn’t matter.
I think my employer did have a grant or something for new hires as well. The other thing I think they have is automatic increases annually of 401k contribution. So just in case you are an employee that doesn’t manually go in to modify contributions, those employees will automatically have an increase of 1% contribution to 401k every where up to a certain upper limit, iirc.
Good luck on the retirement. Hope it works out. Also, when you look at the calculators to project future retirement, they tend to assume the market will greatly underperform historical market performance. For me it looks bad on that default. When I flip the project to match historical performance, or out perform historical performance, my retirement looks excessive. So save as much as you can and follow the guidelines, but there is some luck of market factors involved as to how you will end up.
I work in a municipality in Texas, and despite our state government being crazy the benefits at most cities are fantastic.
We have the Texas Municipal Retirement System in most places. At the last several cities I’ve worked at there’s a mandatory 7% employee contribution, but then the city double-matches the contribution, so I’m paying 7% in while putting 21% away.
The catch is you have to work in TMRS city for a minimum of 5 years before you vest. If you don’t put in your 5 years you only get the 7%.
And the really big cities don’t participate. So I ain’t gonna go work for Austin or Houston.
What’s your employer match for you 401k? that 15% saving should be the savings after your employer match. So if you have that, you might be able actually sacrificing less than 15% of take home pay to save fore retirement.
I’d have to look it up. My company actually just changed the entire system to help out younger employees - but with the effect of hurting employees who have worked here longer. So it actually ends up being harder for me to save up. They acknowledged this, but argued it off as not affecting that many people. (Not many people - just the folks who stuck around the longest!)
The explanation we were given, though, was that 15% came before the matching. So I should take every $100 I earn and stick $15 into my retirement fund. Then, of course, I’d need to put some into healthcare, some into taxes, and some into basic costs of living. Then, when I’m done, I might be lucky enough to have a shiny penny left over. Unless I have any unforeseen expenses in which case I’d go deep into debt.
I think that advice makes sense. Ideally put away more than 15% of your gross income if possible, but I think the general advice is that you should be saving 15% of your gross income every year. Whether part of that 15% of gross comes from employer match or directly from you doesn’t matter.
I think my employer did have a grant or something for new hires as well. The other thing I think they have is automatic increases annually of 401k contribution. So just in case you are an employee that doesn’t manually go in to modify contributions, those employees will automatically have an increase of 1% contribution to 401k every where up to a certain upper limit, iirc.
Good luck on the retirement. Hope it works out. Also, when you look at the calculators to project future retirement, they tend to assume the market will greatly underperform historical market performance. For me it looks bad on that default. When I flip the project to match historical performance, or out perform historical performance, my retirement looks excessive. So save as much as you can and follow the guidelines, but there is some luck of market factors involved as to how you will end up.
I work in a municipality in Texas, and despite our state government being crazy the benefits at most cities are fantastic.
We have the Texas Municipal Retirement System in most places. At the last several cities I’ve worked at there’s a mandatory 7% employee contribution, but then the city double-matches the contribution, so I’m paying 7% in while putting 21% away.
The catch is you have to work in TMRS city for a minimum of 5 years before you vest. If you don’t put in your 5 years you only get the 7%.
And the really big cities don’t participate. So I ain’t gonna go work for Austin or Houston.