Automatic Savings Plan

  

You just enrolled in your employer’s investment plan. You have opted to have 4% of your earnings deposited into an investment account. Let’s say you get paid each month on the 15th and 30th. Instead of taking home $1000 each pay check, you are now taking home $960.

You do not have to personally deposit funds into this investment account. It automatically comes out of your account before you can think about ordering all that stuff from Amazon. Seriously chill, and save your coins.

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Finance: What is Automatic Reinvestment?3 Views

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Finance a la shmoop... what is automatic reinvestment? alright you bought an index

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fund the focus companies whose names begin with the letter G, it's the G

00:14

indexer or G-index so like you know it's a whole lot of groupings of Google a

00:19

gaggle of GE, a glob of Gap, General Mills General Motors, Goldman Sachs you know [Lots of company logos]

00:25

through the Garmin the GPS people that's your index fund all G's while your

00:30

strategy and index picking may leave room for improvement while one element

00:34

you want to take advantage of is the provision for automatic reinvestment

00:38

that is for no incremental commission or fee instead of receiving your dividend

00:44

as cash and spending it on silly things like rent and gas and food you reinvest [Person receiving dividend]

00:50

your dividends and simply buy more shares of the G for good index fund the

00:56

effect over time is that your fund compounds at a much higher rate than it

01:00

would have had you just taken those cash distributions and run well how much

01:05

faster does it compound well if it was to grow at 6% a year without the

01:09

dividends reinvested and the dividends were about 3% a year then your total

01:13

return would have been 9% using you know advanced calculus there and remember

01:18

that rule of 72 thing well it takes an investment compounding at 6% that's 72 [Rule of 72 appears]

01:24

divided by 6 which means that the investment there will take about 12

01:28

years to double but in this case with dividends reinvested and we're gonna

01:32

ignore taxes here it's growing at 9% a year so it takes only 72 divided by 9

01:38

.....8 years to double with the

01:43

automatic reinvestment feature kicking in and 8 is better than 12 when it comes

01:48

to doubling your money in years that is and over time this is a really big deal [Man discussing automatic reinvestment]

01:52

like if you started with 10 grand in savings and just left it invested for 25

01:57

years well here's what it looked like note that you end up with almost double

02:02

your money when you automatically reinvest the money rather than take it

02:05

out as cash and also note you know our thing on taxes here if you have your

02:10

investment in a taxable account as opposed to an IRA or a 401 K which is taxdeferred [Taxable account and IRA/401k piles of cash appear]

02:14

that's how everything kind of plays out so the fund throws off lots of dividends

02:19

which you reinvest not only will you not be taking the cash from those dividends

02:23

but you'll have to pony up cash from some other source to pay the tax as you

02:27

go if you hold your index fund you know in a taxable account anyway if you don't

02:31

need the cash and have the discipline to just reinvest and well forget about it [Woman holding pile of cash]

02:35

you'll be a whole lot richer in the end game and that'll happen right about the

02:40

time you're too old to really enjoy it unfortunately youth is wasted on the [Kids sat on the grass talking]

02:45

young, you'll be too senile to regret it though so that's that's upside right...

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