How old will you be 10 years from now? 30? 40? 50? Let’s say 10 years from now you’ll be 50. That would mean you’re 40 now - 40 and poor and struggling to make money the same way you were struggling to make money at 30, the same way you were struggling to make money at 20. Doesn’t feel like decades have passed without bull returns? It doesn’t usually feel like much time is passing when you’re stuck in a rut. When things aren’t changing much it’s harder to appreciate the reality that time doesn’t stay unchanged along with your circumstances.

So here you are at 40 having the same financial picture as when you were 20, still wishing you had money, still wondering how to turn a few dollars into a few thousand dollars and starting to feel hopeless. But let’s imagine for the sake of making a point that when you were 20 you started saving a dollar per day. A dollar is not a lot of money. As poor as you and I are we can probably find a dollar lying around somewhere every day if we needed to find one. There are times while doing laundry that as many as $30 get retrieved from pockets, but that’s for another post about lacking respect for money. The point here is, most of us can afford to put away a dollar per day. “Put away” doesn’t mean put it in a lock box where you can access it when you’re short of cigarette money, although you could certainly do that, but you won’t be growing your money in the sense of multiplying what you put away. You’ll just be saving it in a lock box in your house and accumulating more of it as you save. By “put away” what is meant is to put your money in an account where it earns a monetary return.

So imagine if you were putting away a dollar per day every day since you were 20. By age 30 you would have $3,650 in an account somewhere collecting interest. By age 40 you would have $7,300 collecting interest. Without doing more than saving a dollar per day you could have made your money grow. And even if you were saving your money in a lock box under your bed and not touching it, your $7,300 could have served as a down-payment on investment property or a home for yourself if you didn’t own a home and were looking to buy one.

Most of us spend more than $1 per day on things we don’t need that fill a momentary impulse. If you kept tabs on the money you spend every day, at the end of the year you’d probably be shocked to realize you’re spending $500 - $1000 per year on things you didn’t need to buy. At $1000 per year, you’d have $20,000 in your lock box by now, or better yet in an account that is collecting interest. $20,000 is not a lot of money, admittedly, but it’s surely a whole lot more money than $0.

So what are you waiting for? Think it’s too late because you’re 40 already and 20 years from now you’ll be 60? Well 20 years from now you might find yourself age 60 right where you are now at age 40, where you were at age 30 and 20. Why is it impossible? Look at you now? Did you think 40 was going to find you still struggling financially, still with no money on the bank?

There are two things you should tell yourself right now:

1. There’s no time like the present

2. It’s better late than never

It’s time to stop being nonchalant and irresponsible with your money. To grow anything you first need to plant a seed. So let’s plant a seed and start growing some money the sure way.

While he did not elaborate I’ve been assured by Stanford graduate and co-founder & VP of Marketing for PBwiki, Ramit Sethi who maintains an excellent blog titled ‘I Will Teach You To Be Rich” which you can find at iwillteachyoutoberich.com that 50 is not too late to open an IRA. Sethi is quite well respected in his field and speaks at companies and schools on personal finance and entrepreneurship.

I will continue to dig to find out what someone who starts an Individual Retirement Account plan at or over age 50 can expect. I definitely think that low income people need to get more involved in managing their money and exploring options for growing their money because even they have options. They just don’t know they have options.

Poverty is only a trap because of lack of knowledge about options. Poor people aren’t talking about money except to complain about not having any because they don’t really understand any aspect of money other than how much of it they need to pay their bills and what’s going to happen if they don’t come up with what they need to pay their bills. They go along with the agreement that financial intelligence requires a college degree. In reality you really don’t need to go to college to acquire knowledge in any area. A degree proves you went to a university. It doesn’t prove you know anything. Poor and uneducated people buy into the mentality that knowledge is out of their reach unless they go to school which for one reason or another they cannot/will not do. Knowledge is all around and often free for the taking. You just need to want it. Knowledge is not for some but not for others. Knowledge isn’t something you have a right to because you’re special. Everyone is equally entitled.

The problem is, even in a formal school setting, information is not being delivered on a level that people can truly comprehend. Particularly with regard to the subject of money, in my own efforts to self-educate, what I find is that things aren’t being explained clearly enough for those of us who aren’t versed in the subject of economics to understand well enough to consider ourselves armed with valuable information. There’s an assumption that the subject of money is basic common sense, but when you start talking in economics terminology even college educated folks who didn’t specialize in economics or other finance related subject get headaches.

People aren’t interested in things they can’t understand. The more students grasp concepts the more interested they become in learning. We’re all students of life, and money is a big part of life for all of us. We should all understand how money works not just as far as knowing how much we need to come up with to pay our bills, or how much change we’re owed, or how many hours we’ll have to work to accumulate a certain amount.

We all need to understand from the earliest age possible that one of these days we’re going to have to take care of ourselves and we’re going to need money to do it and that things will come up in our lives, including a point when we’ll be too old to work, but we’ll still be responsible for ourselves financially, and if we don’t have any money we’ll end up living under a bridge somewhere. Because everything is controlled by money and the quality of the life we live from birth to demise is affected in some way by having or lacking money. And it’s in our older ages when we’re most vulnerable because no one is going to take care of us. Even nursing homes cost money; so it’s important to be prepared because everybody gets old, unless they die young.

It seems the earlier you get started with an individual retirement account the greater the benefit come retirement. As this chart from bank of America shows, David, who started his individual retirement account at age 25 had more money than Alison who started her account at age 35 the same time David started his.

From what I’m reading so far the best age to start an IRA is in your 20s. There’s a maximum per year that you’re allowed to contribute to your IRA so you can’t really play catch up if you’re older. Alison couldn’t have increased her contributions to make up for not starting her IRA at age 25 for example. She had the same $4000 yearly limit as David. So if it takes about 10 years for things to start to compound, it might not make that much sense to start an Individual Retirement Account when you’re 50 for example; but then again there are variables involved depending on your investments.

Since I don’t know for a fact that 50 is too late to really benefit from opening an IRA I’ll be asking around for expert opinion. I personally have more than a decade to go before I’m 50 but my better half is going to be 52 this year so we would personally like to know if 50 is too old to start an IRA and if there are better options for someone pretty close to retirement already. I will let you know what I learn.

It’s little wonder the average person doesn’t invest. The whole process is made to seem so complicated you start to get a headache just trying to understand the very basics. I am still in the process of researching IRAs trying to understand the concepts behind the definitions. It’s easy to read the words that tell you what an IRA is as related to money and investing (the acronym IRA stands for many other things), and how many types of IRA plans exist an so on, but if you don’t actually understand what you’re reading it all amounts to nothing. Being able to say that an IRA is an individual retirement account and being able to explain what is an individual retirement account, how having such an account benefits you, and how to manage such an account are two completely different things.

The obvious seems to be that an individual retirement account helps you save for your retirement; but you can save for your retirement any number of ways so why invest in an IRA plan?

On their website leggmason.com, the company Legg Mason, a global asset management firm headquartered in Baltimore Maryland answer the “Why invest in an IRA?” question in their IRA center. Check out their website for their list of benefits that come with IRA investment.