We grew up in world in which the news about the failure of Social Security is almost as constant as the news about the failure HMOs. We all know that it is unlikely that many people who are currently contributing to social security will ever see the money we’ve invested into the program. At least these funds are probably not coming back to darken our doors. This means we need to find alternatives and end our reliance on the government for a comfortable retirement that doesn’t appear to be in the woodworks.

For this reason we are seeing more and more people in the twenty and thirty something generation taking matters into their own hands and investing not only for their retirements and the days when we can no longer work but also for those days when things happen and we need to fix broken houses, buy new cars, or pay hefty insurance deductibles for medical care. There are many reasons we choose to invest and very few that would ever be considered the wrong reason. The question remains, because there are so many out there who are not yet investing, with so many reasons to invest, are you ready to invest?

Here are a few situations in which if you don’t think you are ready to invest you may need to revisit your opinions and decide that ready or not, you need to invest.

If you have children and a job that doesn’t offer a pension plan or matching retirement fund then it is probably a good idea to invest on your own. Even if you don’t have corporate provisions for contributions you have alternatives such as Roth IRAs that will give you a tax break for investing some of your money and helping to plan for your own retirement. Read the rest of this entry »