Start Investing Now Before It Is Too Late!

Accept it many of you are now spending on bills to pay for what you have wanted for years and now you can finally afford it. The last thing you will thing about is an investment for your retirement. It is your choice whether to have fun with spending money now but suffer when you get older or inverse! Take some advice from those with a little more experience: Start investing early in your career. Start from day one and you will never miss that money you're setting aside. If your company has available a 401-K or a TSP program, jump on the band wagon immediately. If you don't have these programs at your disposal, you can still start an IRA and the concepts stated here are applicable as well.

I can guarantee that it really does it make a difference when you start contributing. It is important to invest in your retirement account early in your career for two reasons. First, if you're fortunate to receive matching contributions, you don't want to miss out on those added contributions that are a significant part of your retirement benefit. Second, the longer contributions stay in your account, the more you stand to gain. Your money makes money in the form of earnings, and those earnings in turn make money, and so on. This is what is known as the "miracle of compounding." As money grows in your account over time, the proportion resulting from earnings will become larger compared to the proportion resulting from contributions.

The size of your account balance is going to depend on how much you (and your company if they match funds up to a certain percentage) contribute to your account and how your account grows as a result of earnings on your investments. To get an idea of what your retirement account could be in the future, look at the following projections.

Think this way. Assume that you are an employee eligible for organizational contributions, that you are earning $28,000 each year, and that you receive no future salary increases. You choose to save 5 percent of basic pay each pay period; therefore you receive total organizational contributions of 5 percent. The growth projections below are for an assumed annual rate of return of 7 percent on your investments.

After five years your account balance would be almost $17,000; after ten years your balance would increase to $40,000; and after contributing for twenty years, your account would have a balance of $122,000. Clearly your balance would continue to increase each year. If you contributed for forty years, which is fathomable if you start a job at 23 and want to retire at age 63, your account balance would be $615,000. That's over half a million dollars folks! Just from contributing 5% of your income from the day you start work!

Can this number convince you to start saving money now?

How To IPod Your Car

If you like to ipod your car - pump music on your ipod through your car stereo system - apart from changing to a brand new car that has ipod integration such as BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan and Volvo - there are other options available to you.

If your car does not have the ipod connectivity, the solution to ipod your car is to install an ipod adaptor.

An ipod adaptor retailed by companies such as Peripheral and Monster can be installed within the cavern of wires behind your car dashboard, with one prong from adaptor going to the back of your stereo while another prong goes to a ipod holder near the front seats of the car.

The ipod adaptor works like an emulator and tricks the stereo to think it is a CD changer, so that you can use the track buttons on the stereo faceplate to select songs of your choice.

Installing an ipod changer might be difficult for the non-mechanical inclined, and the services of a trained mechanic might be easier.

If your car is too old, the factory installed stereo might not be suitable for ipod integration. For such cars, it is advisable to install a new player from manufacturers such as Alpine, Kenwood and Pioneer.

If sound quality is important to you, the use of ipod cassete adaptors is not recommended as the sound quality is not good enough, and more importantly they do not recharge the ipod's battery.

Yet another solution is to use a FM modulator that can produce better sound, and can recharge the batteries, but cannot be directly controlled from the radio.

With these drawbacks, the ipod cassete adaptor and the FM modulator are not the best options, and it is still the ipod adaptor that is recommended.

To facilitate your personal research and to find out what ipod integration is necessary for the model of your car, there are online catalogues from car audio online websites such as that from Crutchfield.com

So your first step is to determine the ipod integration requirements for your car and get the suitable adaptor. Before long, you can be pumping your ipod tracks through your car stereo and enjoying your favorite songs.