The Federal Reserve should keep credit conditions tight for now.
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You’re probably well aware that if you don’t make an effort to save for retirement, you may be forced to live on Social Security alone when you’re older. And that could mean living frugally to an extreme.
The average Social Security recipient today collects just $1,907 a month, or a little less than $23,000 per year. Granted, if you’re far from retirement, the average monthly benefit (and yearly benefit) is likely to be much higher by the time your career wraps up due to inflation and cost-of-living adjustments.
The point, however, is that it’s important to bring savings with you into retirement. And in that regard, many people have work to do.
Image source: Getty Images.
Recent Motley Fool research found that the median retirement savings across U.S. households was $87,000, as of 2022. For a 20-something or 30-something household, that’s not terrible. But for older households, that figure is worrisome.
If you’re looking to boost your retirement savings, you don’t necessarily have to go to the extreme of working a 20-hour-a-week side gig or denying yourself all non-essential expenses to grow your 401(k) or IRA. Rather, these simple moves could be your ticket to more savings — and more options in retirement.
1. Save your raise every year
Many companies have a policy of giving out cost-of-living raises year to year, the same way Social Security benefits are eligible for an annual cost-of-living adjustment. One thing it pays to do is save your entire raise from the very start of the year — before you get used to having extra money in your paycheck. That way, the additional money you’re saving is money you won’t even miss.
2. Claim your full 401(k) match
Many employers offer a match of some sort in their 401(k). You may not be in love with your company’s retirement plan because it lacks investment choices or charges high fees. And if that’s the case, you can make an IRA your main retirement savings vehicle. But at the very least, put enough money into your 401(k) to claim your employer match in full so you’re not giving up so much as $1 for your retirement.
3. Time your departure from your employer strategically
Some employers with a 401(k) match impose a vesting schedule. Yours could mean that you’re not entitled to your full 401(k) match until you’ve been with the company for a specified period of time.
If you’re thinking of leaving your job, read up on your vesting schedule and time your resignation accordingly. It may be that waiting two or three months to leave could enable you to walk away with thousands more in your 401(k).
4. Bank any windfalls that come your way
During the year, you may come into extra money, whether in the form of a tax refund, bonus, commission, or even a gift. That’s money that can all go into your long-term savings. And if you think random contributions won’t make a huge difference, consider this: If you put an extra $200 you get as a holiday gift into your IRA at age 25 and invest it at an average annual 8% return, which is a bit below the stock market’s average, it’ll be worth over $4,300 by the time you turn 65.
To be clear, the money that goes into your IRA needs to be earned income. But this advice assumes that you work and earn money, and a $200 gift allows you to allocate $200 more from your paycheck toward retirement savings.
Boosting your nest egg is something you might feel the need to do. Before you make yourself miserable in the course of increasing your IRA or 401(k) contributions, see if these relatively painless steps do the trick of helping your savings get to a better place.
If you’re fairly young and decades away from being able to claim Social Security, then the program might be a big mystery to you. You may be aware that in the future, you’ll be eligible for some sort of monthly benefit. But you may not have a clue as to what that benefit looks like.
The good news, though, is that the Social Security Administration (SSA) doesn’t want to keep that information a secret. Quite the contrary — there’s an easy step you can take to figure out what monthly benefit you might be in line for once your career comes to an end.
Image source: Getty Images.
A small amount of legwork is all it takes
Each year, the SSA issues workers an earnings statement that summarizes their wages for the year. You can access yours by creating an account on the SSA’s website, since these statements don’t automatically get sent out by mail until you turn 60.
Your earnings statement, in addition to a wage summary, will also include an estimate of your future monthly Social Security benefit. So rather than completely guess at that number, you’ll at least have a starting point.
Of course, the younger you are, the more likely your estimate is to change over time. The monthly Social Security benefit you’ll be eligible for in retirement will hinge on your wages earned during your 35 most profitable years in the labor force. If you’re only in your 30s, for example, it may be that your earnings haven’t yet peaked, so your estimate may not be the most spot-on.
But again, it’s good to use that estimate as a starting point. That way, you can start to do some thorough retirement planning.
Use that information to your advantage
The upside of getting an estimate of your monthly Social Security benefit well ahead of retirement is that it might inspire you to work harder at building savings.
Let’s say you were expecting to get $4,000 a month out of Social Security, only to look at your earnings statement at age 45 and see an estimate of $2,000 instead. Clearly, that’s a much smaller sum. But seeing that number on screen might motivate you to start boosting your IRA or 401(k) plan contributions while you still have another 20 years in the workforce or more.
You should also know that if you’re not so thrilled with the estimate you get, you can always take steps to set yourself up for a higher monthly benefit. Those could include boosting your income with wages from a second job and, later on, delaying your Social Security claim beyond full retirement age. For each year you hold off past that point up until age 70, your Social Security benefit gets to grow 8%.
When it comes to financial matters, it’s always a good thing to be in the know. It pays to get an estimate of your future monthly Social Security benefit, whether you’re 25 or 65. Having that information could influence your approach to retirement savings and help you arrive at a place where you don’t have to worry about money so much once your career has concluded.
MALIBU, California – The most amazing thing about the $2.1 million Rimac Nevera is how easy it is to just get in and drive.
The Nevera is an electric hypercar from Croatia. It sits low — very low — to the ground, and at first glance it looks like the simple act of getting into it could be complicated. But the doors, which lift up and out sort of like a Lamborghini’s, cut into the roof just enough to ensure that I don’t bump my head as I drop myself into the driver’s seat.
Getting underway does take a little bit of learning. Gears are shifted with a big knob to the left of the steering wheel, the power seat’s adjustments are hidden in a touchscreen, and switches for the turn signals and headlights are mounted directly on the steering wheel. But once you’ve got that down, it’s simple to operate.
The whole car is like that — simple to operate — its 1,914 horsepower notwithstanding.
One of the first things I noticed as we got underway is that it’s easy to see out of the Nevera. That’s not a given with cars like this. For example, in Ferraris and Lamborghinis and other low-slung highway rockets, it’s often a challenge to see what’s behind you. But while the Nevera is definitely low slung, there’s just enough of a rear window to make it easy to drive in highway traffic. Good side mirrors certainly help with that.
There’s also just enough mechanical noise to remind you that you’re in a hypercar. There may not be an engine, but there are four electric motors and they make mellifluous mechanical sounds as the car moves down the road. Not so loud that I couldn’t converse with my passenger, Rimac’s Ryan Lanteigne, in a reasonable talking voice. It is just loud enough to remind us that we’re driving in something special.
And the Nevera is very special indeed — as it should be for its just over $2 million asking price. You’ll see why in the video.
The Rimac story
Rimac — pronounced REE-mahtz, roughly — is Croatia’s first and only automaker. Its 35-year-old founder, Mate (MAH-ta) Rimac, started tinkering with electric vehicles after he blew the engine in an old BMW he raced as a teenager. After rebuilding it with an electric drivetrain — and winning some races, besides — he founded Rimac Automobili in 2009, hoping to one day build an electric supercar in his home country.
Although Rimac the company’s first years were a struggle, Mate’s timing turned out to be excellent in retrospect, with automakers around the world moving to electrify their fleets.
Rimac’s early prototypes were impressive enough to attract significant investments from Hyundai and Porsche, and it raised another 500 million euros (or about $534 million) last year. Those served as the foundation of what is now a thriving business consulting to traditional automakers eager to build high-performance EVs. Aston Martin and Swedish supercar maker Koenigsegg are among Rimac’s clients, along with a number of others that the company says it can’t yet disclose.
The Nevera is named for the fierce summer storms that roll into Croatia from the Adriatic Sea. (Rimac employees like to say that neveras — the storms — are “extremely powerful and charged by lightning,” just like their car.)
The Nevera (the car) serves both as a rolling display of Rimac’s EV expertise and as the supercar that Mate Rimac has long dreamed of building. It’s a four-motor design — one for each wheel — with a 120 kilowatt-hour battery pack, enough for about 300 miles of range under normal driving conditions.
Four motors and a cravat
But there’s nothing normal about the Nevera’s power output. Those four motors give it a total of 1,914 horsepower, and 2,360 newton-meters of torque — enough for a top speed of 258 miles per hour. Zero to 60 miles per hour takes just 1.74 seconds, according to Rimac.
I didn’t verify that time with any great accuracy, but I can attest that such a power thrust is plausible. As friendly as it is to drive in traffic, the Nevera is almost unbelievably quick when fully uncorked. But it never feels uncontrollable, and that’s a significant engineering achievement.
Even more impressive, albeit more subtle, is the way those four motors work together. The car’s systems adjust each motor’s power output 100 times a second to ensure optimum handling moment to moment. Or, put another way, the Nevera blasts through and out of tight corners without hesitation. That’s a trick that other supercars can only emulate with braking.
It’s an even more impressive trick given the car’s weight, around 5,100 pounds. But as hard as it might be to believe, that weight is so well packaged, with the batteries mounted low and close to the Nevera’s center, that it’s hardly noticeable. (Of course, the tremendous power on tap helps.)
It’s a good-looking car, too, low and radical but not over the top. Civilized. It’s well-made, with flawless carbon fiber on the outside and comfortable leather throughout the interior. Croatia doesn’t have a tradition of car making, but the Nevera does reflect some national pride: In addition to the car’s name, the intakes on its sides are styled to resemble a cravat, the ancestor of the modern necktie — a Croatian invention dating to the 16th century.
The Nevera starts at 2 million euros, or just over $2.1 million. If that’s in your price range, speak up soon. Rimac says it plans to build just 150 of them.
I signed up to try Waymo as soon as it became available in San Francisco, and this weekend Alphabet’s self-driving car company finally invited me to give it a shot.
My son Marlon has been obsessed with self-driving cars this year, as we’ve seen more and more Waymos and competing GM Cruise vehicles tootling around San Francisco without safety drivers. We thought we noticed them getting more aggressive in recent months — nothing frightening, but they seemed to be pulling into intersections and merging into lanes more assertively, just like a normal San Francisco driver would do.
Last month, Waymo and Cruise won approval to operate driverless cars in San Francisco at any time of day. So with self-driving cars a common feature of our local landscape, we were excited to give one a try.
Saturday morning, we headed down to the local drugstore to buy sunglasses, then used the Waymo app on my phone to order a ride home. It would be about a five-minute drive, but would save us a steep uphill walk.
The car pulled up with my initials, MR, on the display below the rotating lidar sensor on the roof. The door handles were flush with the side of the car until I selected the “unlock” option from the app, at which point they popped out like normal door handles.
We both climbed in. The A/C was blowing cool air. The interior was bathed in light pink light from the iPad-sized console at the front of the back seat, and soft ambient music was playing. It definitely had a “welcome to the future” vibe. A female recorded voice gave us some instructions to fasten our seatbelts and not touch the brakes or steering wheel, then it pulled into motion.
The car performed as if a competent human were driving. It didn’t hesitate to cross the (imaginary) center line when it had to get around a parked car on a narrow street, and stuck toward the middle on a very narrow section with cars on both sides. The ride was smooth and the speed constant at just under 25 miles per hour.
We fiddled with the interior console to try and connect it to my iPhone to play music from my library, but the ride was so short that I only had time to download the Google Assistant (required for that function) before it was over.
For some reason, the Waymo wouldn’t drive us right to our door. Our house is at the top of a very steep crest on a narrow street that has four buses running up and down it every hour, so maybe it was too much to handle. As it approached our drop-off point, the voice told us that we’d be ending our ride soon, and to touch the handle twice — once to unlock the door, a second time to open it. We did as instructed, walked out of the car, and it pulled slowly off.
The trip cost $8, about the same as a Lyft or Uber. As my son pointed out, Alphabet doesn’t have any drivers to pay, so the money all goes straight to the company as revenue.
The ride itself was completely uneventful. A little boring, even. The whole experience reminded me of the way smartphones or the internet were miraculous at first, but now seem mundane.
I was a skeptic about the promise of self-driving cars. It seemed like one of those technologies that’s been perpetually a few years away. But after taking this ride, I can absolutely see it becoming a very common way to get around for short urban trips, as long as Waymo and its competitors can scale up in a cost-effective way.
Consumers, investors and regulators better get ready, because the technology is here and it’s so advanced it seems natural and safe upon first use.
WATCH: NBC Bay Area reporter takes a ride in a malfunctioning robotaxi
