Ben Stein always has insightful and humorous columns.  This one is not one of his funniest, but is includes some good advice.  It also includes one piece of advice that I continue to wrestle with in our own retirement planning.  One of his items of advice is:

Put at least 15 percent of your wages into these investments every month, before you buy a plasma-screen TV or a cruise or even your child’s education.

Keep doing it even when the commentators are telling you that the markets are collapsing and the sky is falling.

Now, I fully understand the concept behind saving for retirement before your child’s education: your child can always borrow money for an education.  You can’t borrow money to live in retirement.  The good folks over at Sound Mind Investing even have discussed this issue with the same conclusion:  it appears to be finanicially responsible to save for retirement before saving for education.

But the mainstream financial pundits have always preached about saving for your children’s education.  Even in our family, there are divergent thoughts on this:  I worked my way through school, took out low interest loans, and studied my “caboose” off to obtain scholarships, and feel that this is an acceptable way to aproach educational funding.  Mardi, on the other hand, was fortunate enough to have had the means to go through school from saved funds and feels that we should do as much as possible to make this happen for our girls also.

Looks like we have more “couple conferencing” to do! 

Enjoy Stein’s article, and his others too!  There is a great one here on the important things in life and here on getting ahead in your carrer.

Jonathan

Technorati Tags: Ben Stein, retirement, important life lessons, sound mind investing

powered by performancing firefox