Kevin O’Leary says investing $100 a week will make you a millionaire by retirement
MarketWatch
By: Alessandra Malito
The FIRE movement is a ‘motivational platform’ to get people thinking about their future financial stability, he says.
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Everyone approaches retirement differently, but there’s only one way they should really prepare for it: by investing, said Kevin O’Leary, a host of ABC’s DIS, 0.51% television series “Shark Tank.”
Some people plan for retirement over the course of their careers, while others wait to think about that next stage of their lives when it gets closer. Not all Americans save adequately for their old age, partially because they can’t afford to do so or because they have other, more present-day financial obligations, such as student loans, child care and high costs of living, to worry about.
Still, there’s a portion of the population, albeit small, that pursues retirement early — in some cases, by the time they’re in their 30s or 40s. They do so by living frugally and dedicating most of their income to the stock market. This movement is known as FIRE, short for “financial independence, retire early.” O’Leary, founder of the O’Leary Financial Group, originally spoke about the FIRE movement with Grant Sabatier, an early retiree and host of the Millennial Money podcast, where they also discussed the skills it takes to achieve such a feat.
The “Shark Tank” host, known as Mr. Wonderful on the show, spoke with MarketWatch about how feasible saving for retirement is for most Americans, how they can become millionaires by the time they retire and why Americans need to take the concept of financial independence so seriously. This interview was edited for clarity and length.
Kevin O’Leary:
“…I make the point that the pandemic has exposed one of those classic “king has no clothes on” situations. When I was doing PPP [Paycheck Protection Program] loans with the companies I’m an investor of, I discovered a majority of them did not have anything saved or even invested for retirement. Some of these people are in their late 20s, some in their late 30s, some in their late 40s. That exposed a big problem to me and the more I dug into it, I found out more than 100 million Americans don’t even have any investment accounts. That’s over a third of the population who don’t have anything saved for retirement. So I like the idea of focusing on retirement because it is a wake-up call. But the truth is, when you come to that point in your life, a majority of the people don’t have enough to retire on, given how low interest rates are for savings accounts and they haven’t invested in the markets properly over their entire career. I founded a new app to help solve this problem, I’m the chairman of it — it’s called Beanstox — and it helps people pull small amounts of capital into a portfolio that invests for them over the next 20, 30, 40 years.”
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