3. Plan out your goals and priorities. "Hopefully you're starting to become established in your career and can begin to contribute, if you're not already, to an employer-sponsored retirement plan,
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View all Courses and begin to think about other savings goals, too, like a home purchase or college savings," says Suzanna de Baca, vice president of wealth strategies at Ameriprise Financial.
Trent Hamm, founder of the personal finance website The Simple Dollar and a U.S. News My Money blogger, says at age 35, he's now reflecting on his career goals for the next 30 years. "What would I like to be doing with my time and my life? I don't want the rest of my life to be a repetition of what I'm doing now and then an abrupt retirement. I have dreams and goals, and right now is the best time to get started on them," he says.
For many people, a financial adviser helps with that. Bart Astor, author of "AARP Roadmap for the Rest of Your Life," says your 30s is the ideal time to sit down with a financial adviser and talk, which is what he started doing in his mid-30s. He says he and his adviser met once a year to review savings and other financial goals, especially since he and his wife were meeting their goals. "When I hit 40, the plan showed that we should have about $188,000 in assets based on our salaries, and we had over $200,000, and boy, did that make us feel good," he says.