I made the mistake of checking in on my 401k; it’s down (only?) 29% from the beginning of the year. Thankfully I have another thirty odd years before “retirement.”
In addition to saving for retirement I occasionally try to save more. The time I was most successful at saving outside of retirement was at Microsoft when it was easy to sign in to the payroll system online to re-direct a portion of my pay check to my non-spending account. Sadly at the ‘Fin we don’t have such a sophisticated payroll system.
One of these days I hope to go back to saving more. Something that is motivating me is a simple strategy I read about recently in Business Week, The Psychology of Saving More:
Those who planned savings for the next month did far better than those who tried to plan further out.
I’ll let you know how it works for me.