I recently finished reading your book The Automatic Millionaire. I just wanted to say thanks for inspiring my wife and I to take immediate action on saving/planning for our future. I need to give my wife the credit for buying me the book as well. As we’re only 25/26 years old, I believe we’re well on our way to retiring like the McIntyre’s.
Real briefly, we saved up and bought our first house in November 2002 and have been proud homeowners ever since. I started my 401k at work over a year ago as well and now have a good $7,000+ in that, and my wife recently started hers. I have also recently increased my % from 5% to 8%. Everything we do is Automatic as well. With the amount of equity we raised in our house, we took out a home equity loan and paid off all of our credit card debt, high interest car loans and store cards – saving us so much money each month. We have closed these accounts and have promised to just say NO when it comes to opening anymore of these accounts. If we don’t have cash to buy it, then we obviously don’t need it right away.
We also set up an ING Direct Savings account where we pay ourselves currently $75 a week. This cash we are determined not to touch. We also have a savings account with our bank as our emergency/backup savings for if times go bad…and have close to two months expenses saved. Unfortunately our mortgage lender does not have biweekly payments; however, I took your advice and have added an additional 10% to each payment.
So we’re doing things as outlined in your book and will eventually increase our portions to our 401K as we learn to live with less. We’ve also been giving back by donating a small dollar amount of each check to charities of our choice. My wife and I just wanted to say thank you for inspiring us and we hope to one day be like the McIntyre’s and retire sooner than later.
