3 Easy Ways You Can Save for Retirement--While Still Growing (and Investing in) Your Business

Author: Kate Rockwood

Building your business and saving for retirement might not seem compatible--but there are immediate benefits to long-term planning.

For six years, Matt Stadelman and his co-founders had pushed retirement savings to the bottom of their to-do list, as they plowed any spare cash into growing their St. Paul, Minnesota-based business, Jet Construction & Remodeling. "I was so focused on the present," he recalls. "When we finally put together a retirement plan for our staff, the light bulb went off: We should be taking care of ourselves, too."

On some level, Stadelman thought he had been saving for retirement--by building up a business he hoped to one day sell. But when that time came, in 2007, the sale price was far lower than he'd hoped--or planned--for. And Stadelman, who now advises other entrepreneurs as a partner at Navalign Wealth Partners in Los Angeles, warns that he sees many others repeating his mistake: More than a third of business owners have no retirement savings plan in place, according to a 2017 Manta survey of about 2,000 entrepreneurs. Nearly one in five of those surveyed are banking on funding their retirement by selling their business--which isn't always a safe bet.
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"I think, as entrepreneurs, we're so optimistic that things are going to work out, if we just work our asses off," says Emily Lonigro, founder of the Chicago-based design studio LimeRed. "But at some point, it was like: I have to save."

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