I just wanted to write you a note to say that I really enjoyed your book, The Automatic Millionaire. I bought it after I saw you on the Oprah show. Your message really made sense to me. I received the book yesterday from Amazon.com and finished it today and now am going to start it over again so I can take notes.
So far I think I am doing quite well. I am a 25 year old firefighter in Burlington, Vermont, not making an overly abundant amount of money, but I make it a point of put away 16.5% of my gross pay automatically – 8% goes to the city retirement system which I draw from when I am able to retire at 45 years old and the other 8% goes into a Nationwide Retirement account with an aggressive portfolio. I have been doing this for the past 3 years consistently and it is amazing to see how much it has grown. My wife works for IBM and has been putting 5% of her gross into her 401k with a 50% employer match along with putting an additional 3% into her IBM stock options at 20% off. I really think we are well on our way. We also own our own home which we refinanced to a 15 year mortgage last April so it will be paid for when I’m 39.
Since reading your book I’m thinking maybe we can put a few percent more into each of our funds. The only issue is we haven’t got a whole lot of cash in our savings account. Tomorrow I am going to call ING Direct and talk to them about their Orange Savings Account. You mentioned in your book that it was a lot like a money market. You were right when you said that an easly accessible account is to hard to save with. We are going to take $1000.00 of our tax return and open the Orange account with it then fund it with $100.00 automatically from my wife’s paycheck every month. It doesn’t seem like much but it is something. I really want to have that 3 month emergency fund available and stop worring about funding the inevitable catastrophe.
I’m sure that you receive a hundred of these letters a day, but I had to let you know that your book did help me and I am going to make some changes to help streamline my life and future.
