Pensions
Employer pension matching is the most ignored free money there is
Declining a match is a voluntary pay cut. It is also extremely common.
Tara Vasquez
Editor, Money After Thirty
Tara edits Money After Thirty and started it after a year in which four financial decisions arrived at once.
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38 articles
Big Decisions
Costing a career break before you take one
The lost salary is the obvious number. The pension gap and the re-entry discount are the ones that surprise people.
Safety Nets
How much emergency fund is enough once you have dependants
The standard rule of thumb was written for a single person with a portable job. The variables change.
Safety Nets
What income protection actually replaces
Most households insure the house and the car and not the income that pays for both.
Big Decisions
Overpaying a mortgage against investing the same money
The comparison looks like a rate calculation and is mostly a risk and certainty decision.
Earning
The second income that is not worth the hours
Side income is priced in money and paid for in time, tax and admin. Some of it does not clear the bar.
Earning
Changing career at thirty-five and what the pay cut really costs
The visible cost is a lower salary for a few years. The larger one is what those years were contributing to in the background.
Earning
Returning to work after years out of it
The hard part is rarely the work. It is pricing yourself when the last figure you knew is several years stale.
Earning
Two careers, one household, and whose job moves
Most couples decide this once, implicitly, and then live with the compounding consequences for twenty years.
Pensions
The pensions you left behind at old jobs
Several employers over fifteen years leaves several small pots. People routinely lose track of some of them entirely.
Family Costs
Parental leave: the part of the decision that outlasts the leave
The months of reduced income are the visible cost. Who takes the leave shapes the next decade of both careers.
Family Costs
Supporting adult children while funding your own retirement
Both demands land in the same decade, and the money given cannot be recovered later. Naming a limit in advance is the only…
Big Decisions
The arrangement you made five years ago and never revisited
Household decisions get made under one set of conditions and then run on autopilot long after the conditions have changed.
Safety Nets
The gap between the last payslip and the first new one
Job changes and job losses both create a period with no income arriving. The length of it surprises people more than the fact of it.
Safety Nets
When one income covers everything
A single-income household is not a smaller version of a two-income one. It has a different risk shape, and the concentration is the…
Safety Nets
What a household loses financially when a partner dies
Beyond the grief, there is an income that stops, a set of costs that do not, and a period of administration that takes months.
Safety Nets
The emergency fund you keep raiding
A fund that empties every few months is not failing. It is being used for things that were never emergencies.
Safety Nets
Separation, and the financial reset nobody plans for
One household becomes two on roughly the same income, which is the arithmetic that makes everything else difficult.
Looking Ahead
Power of attorney: what it does and what it does not
It has to exist before it is needed, because the event that makes it necessary is usually the event that makes it impossible to…
Looking Ahead
The inheritance you should not build a plan around
Expected inheritances shrink, arrive late, or do not arrive. Planning as though one is certain is the version that goes wrong.
Earning
The specialism that pays well now and narrows later
Deep expertise commands a premium precisely because few people have it, and the same scarcity means very few employers need it.
Earning
A four-day week is a purchase, not a perk
Buying back a day of the week has a price, and the price includes several things that never appear on the payslip.
Pensions
A pension is not the only thing funding your retirement
Most households arrive at later life with income from several places, and the ones that plan around a single pot usually misjudge…
Family Costs
Booking a nursery place before you know you need it
In many areas the deadline to secure childcare falls long before a household has decided who is returning to work and on what terms.
Family Costs
Childcare ends, and the money does not come back
Households spend years waiting for the childcare bill to stop, and the month it does, the space it leaves is absorbed within weeks.
Big Decisions
The qualification your employer pays for, and the strings attached
Sponsored study looks like free training, and the clawback clause turns it into a loan you repay by staying.
Big Decisions
Guaranteeing someone else's borrowing
Agreeing to stand behind a loan feels like a formality until the day the lender stops chasing the borrower and starts chasing you.
Big Decisions
Two people, one decision, two appetites for risk
Households rarely disagree about goals; they disagree about how much uncertainty is tolerable on the way there, and that argument…
Safety Nets
The cover you bought for a life you no longer live
Protection is usually arranged once, at a moment when the household looked completely different, and then left to run for a decade.
Safety Nets
A household with no slack has no options
The practical cost of running with no margin is not the interest on an overdraft; it is that every decision gets made under…
Safety Nets
The month everything renews at once
Most households have one or two months a year that are structurally worse than the rest, and almost none of them know which.
Safety Nets
Making a claim when you are least able to
Protection only helps if somebody completes the process, and the process arrives at the exact moment the household has no capacity…
Looking Ahead
The parent who will not accept help
Refusal is usually about autonomy rather than about money, and treating it as a financial argument is why the conversation keeps…
Looking Ahead
A will written before the children arrived
A document drawn up for a household of two, ten years ago, is still the legally operative one until somebody changes it.
Looking Ahead
Care paid in time rather than money
One sibling usually ends up providing most of the care, and the value of that is rarely counted by anyone, including the person…
Looking Ahead
Accounts nobody else can reach
A household's money increasingly lives behind passwords and two-factor codes, and none of that survives the person who set it up.
Looking Ahead
Downsizing later than planned
Almost everyone intends to move somewhere smaller eventually, and the intention is usually acted on a decade after it would have…
Looking Ahead
Naming a guardian for children who may be grown by then
The appointment is made when children are small and the document is rarely revisited, which means it ages badly in both directions.