Here's the deal: go find some free retirement planning calculator on the internet.
They're cute little gimmicks. They let you figure out how much dough you'll want to have in big dusty heaps prior to telling your boss just exactly how much you love working with him.
They require you to make a bunch of assumptions about the interest rate you'll be getting on your big dusty heaps of money, and the amounts of inflation you'll by facing (inflation is just the reverse of interest from your point of view; one of them makes you money, the other steals your money).
Then figure out, at your current rate, how long it'll take you to pay off your current debt load so that you can start saving for retirement.
How old will you be?
If you're like a bunch of people with as much unsecured (credit cards, medical bills, and similar debts), you'll be approximately 6,432 years old before you get to start putting dough in your retirement account.
Which means that by age 65, you'll be either dead or dead broke, or both.
Try this experiment: see what happens if you decide to start saving tomorrow, after a hypothetical Chapter 7 bankruptcy. You see, according to the Joseph C. McDaniel Rule of Bankruptcy Inevitability (which says that as soon as you have as much unsecured debt as your yearly gross income, it's fairly inevitable that there's a bankruptcy in your future), you're probably going to file after you've exhausted yourself making interest-only payments, or minimum payments, and then when there's a speed bump, you'll file.
What kind of speed bump might be the proximate cause of a decision to file a bankruptcy? The fun kind. The heart attack, cancer, divorce, employer closed the doors kind. The out of work for the first time in thirty years and nobody wants to hire an old guy kind.
So consider your options; what's the best time to file your Chapter 7 bankruptcy if you ever want to use that retirement calculator as anything but a toy?
They're cute little gimmicks. They let you figure out how much dough you'll want to have in big dusty heaps prior to telling your boss just exactly how much you love working with him.
They require you to make a bunch of assumptions about the interest rate you'll be getting on your big dusty heaps of money, and the amounts of inflation you'll by facing (inflation is just the reverse of interest from your point of view; one of them makes you money, the other steals your money).
Then figure out, at your current rate, how long it'll take you to pay off your current debt load so that you can start saving for retirement.
How old will you be?
If you're like a bunch of people with as much unsecured (credit cards, medical bills, and similar debts), you'll be approximately 6,432 years old before you get to start putting dough in your retirement account.
Which means that by age 65, you'll be either dead or dead broke, or both.
Try this experiment: see what happens if you decide to start saving tomorrow, after a hypothetical Chapter 7 bankruptcy. You see, according to the Joseph C. McDaniel Rule of Bankruptcy Inevitability (which says that as soon as you have as much unsecured debt as your yearly gross income, it's fairly inevitable that there's a bankruptcy in your future), you're probably going to file after you've exhausted yourself making interest-only payments, or minimum payments, and then when there's a speed bump, you'll file.
What kind of speed bump might be the proximate cause of a decision to file a bankruptcy? The fun kind. The heart attack, cancer, divorce, employer closed the doors kind. The out of work for the first time in thirty years and nobody wants to hire an old guy kind.
So consider your options; what's the best time to file your Chapter 7 bankruptcy if you ever want to use that retirement calculator as anything but a toy?
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