Inside The Plan

Time for a Personal Audit?

In this episode of ‘Inside the Plan with the 401(k) Brothers’, Bill Bush and Andy Bush, advisors at Horizon Financial Group talk about the benefits of doing a personal audit and share some tips on how to do that.

 

Episode Highlights:                

 

  • 01:18: - Andy says that last year during pandemic it seemed like there was almost a little bit more freedom as they were still working, but there weren't as many extracurricular activities going on.
  • 03:20: - He says that he goes through some old pictures on phone and writes down some life events.
  • 05:09: - Andy states that when you go through this exercise, maybe one of the rows would be how much I contributed.
  • 07:25: - They discuss that in order to know whether you're making progress you need to ask yourself what things you can control and can do differently going forward?
  • 09:30: - Bill mentions that in his 20s & 30s, he went through without contributing to a retirement plan.
  • 11:30: He reiterates that an annual audit can be done at any time and this can be done on a sheet of paper or an Excel spreadsheet.
  • 12:36: - Andy says that personal audit might help you curb your spending as well as saving habits.

 

3 Key Points:

 

  1. The one thing you can do is to use the resources that you have available like put your previous year’s salary in there and identify what percentage of your salary did you actually contribute?
  2. Going back in the past is great to see the history and the record and the trend, but then going forward you should ask yourself that can I do something differently that would make even a bigger impact.
  3. Don't waste the opportunity ‘Inside your Plan’; use the tools that are available from your 401k provider. Ultimately, it's you that is going to need resources, so even the small dollar amounts in your 20s add up-to bigger.

 

Tweetable Quotes:

 

  • “This may be different when you're listening to America, but just time to step back and say, hey, what have we accomplished?” – Andy Bush
  • “Well, it's the things that we've talked about before of controlling the things you can control, right” - Andy Bush
  • “And these things and saving for a retirement plan, it seems to be small amounts, and just a slow process getting boring.” – Bill Bush
  • “If you don't want to go there, there's plenty of tools online, you can just Google those and just work out the assumptions.” - Bill Bush
  • “You know, and so eventually I put away a little money in an IRA.” - Bill Bush
  • “Well, it kind of reminds me in doing something like this an exercise, which is basically an annual audit.” - Bill Bush

 

 

Resources Mentioned:

  • Inside The Plan with the 401(k) Brothers -- Podcast
  • Horizon Financial Group -- Website

 

Contact Information:

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