Cardoe wrote this in the wee hours:
So every now and then it sparks up and people start talking financial stuff in #gentoo-dev, John and I will usually pipe in with a comment like “Go read http://www.mymoneyblog.com, get yourself an HSBC savings account, get yourself an IRA, contribute as much as you can to your IRA and squirrel away at least 2 months worth of living expenses in your HSBC account.” or something to that effect. Why do we say this? Because many of the Gentoo developers are youngins, I can’t really talk since I just recently turned 24 but there’s lots of people younger then me in Gentoo. People my age and younger tend to be compulsive spenders and hold down a job during college just enough to pay the rising minimums on that credit card some blonde girl working for the credit card company convinced them to get for a t-shirt.
So why is that our constant advice? Well it’s never too early to start saving away for those Golden Years (hey, devs… you need to be able to retire early and dedicate yourselves to purely Gentoo work in ~30 - 35 years). Plus, you can always use that money towards a home purchase since first time buyers are exempt from most early withdrawl taxes and fees associated with IRA accounts, I say most because there are some situations where you can still get dinged. Some more good info is available, at The Motley Fool. And lastly the savings account is always a smart idea because you never know what can happen or what can come along. It’s best to be prepared. You can loose your job at any point, if you’re in college you might find that your work schedule is too demanding and hurting your grades and find yourself in the position that you have to quit.
Or the best example is my landlord one year in college swung by the house we were renting from him and he offered us a 25% discount on our rent if we could prepay 6 months in advance out of the 7 we had remaining. Since I wasn’t too sure of his financial situation, we worked it out that our lease would also be amended that the last months rent would be the security deposit (plus the difference we still owed since the deposit was 1/2 a month) and we’d take care of anything that needed to be fixed up. Because one of my roommates and I had saved up enough we were able to accept the deal and our third roommate paid us back each for the next 3 months. But it was definitely nice not to have to worry about a rent payment the rest of that year. As an added bonus, when I sent him the fractional rent payment in the last month, the check got returned to me in the mail and he never came to get our keys from us or inquire if we were moving out. 3 months later I saw him in an ad on TV for his real estate business on TV. No idea what happened to him during that time period or why he needed the cash so quick, but it worked out to our benefit.
Moral of the story. Start saving away for retirement kids. Do this wisely, don’t be like your other peers and start educating yourself early and read about financial topics. And always have a little bit of cash saved away, don’t be like the rest of the college kids and constantly hit that overdraft mark and have to live off of Ramen for two weeks because your next paycheck went to pay the overdraft fees.
Oh, what prompted this post was Josh Jackson was asking me about some stuff in #gentoo-dev and I remembered Seemant’s blog post from a while back.
Filed under: General, Linux
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