SILENT ENDURANCE

At thirty-two, Mandy has amassed almost $200,000 for her future

MANDY SPLAWN LIKES TO TAKE a fast and passionate approach to life. This is the kind of thing you learn early on about the Greenville, South Carolina, native.

Her recent exploits include skydiving in Elberta, Alabama, with the air force’s Blue Angels skydiving team; taking her mother up for a hot air balloon ride over Asheville, North Carolina, on Mother’s Day; and even burning rubber on her own during the Mario Andretti Indy Car Experience at Charlotte Motor Speedway.

“I got in an actual Indy car and raced it around the track for eight minutes all by myself! My top speed was 156.16 miles per hour,” the thirty-two-year-old graphic designer says. “LOVED IT!”

Mandy’s preparations for retirement are similarly high-octane. Since starting her career in 1996 at the age of sixteen, she’s built up a nest egg of $160,000. Plus, she has another $13,000 in liquid cash savings.

But perhaps the most amazing thing about Mandy’s story is that she’s done all that—both the saving and the playing—while being a full-time caretaker for her father and mother in the wake of some devastating health developments.

Mandy’s late father was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) and lived for more than five years before succumbing to it. And her mother, coping with the stress of her husband’s illness, suffered a stroke that left her legally blind in 2005 when she was forty-nine.

To deal with something like that, you have to be strong and resilient, and possess what Mandy calls “silent endurance.” Why do I tell you about her? To show you how somebody can overcome obstacles in life and still save for retirement like nobody’s business.

Mandy got started saving early in her life on her dad’s advice.

“My father told me early on . . . to get plugged into 401(k)s, Roths, IRAs, stocks, etcetera, [which was] something he had never done because of the era he was born in. He also taught me that if I don’t see the money, I won’t spend the money,” Mandy says.

“So, since the age of nineteen, I’ve invested anywhere between 15 to 27 percent of my paycheck into these retirement options. I’m trying to do the very best for my own retirement while I have taken care of my beloved parents.”

As you can imagine, Mandy has her personal finance ledger in tip-top shape with a less than 1 percent debt-to-income (DTI) ratio and excellent credit.

“I [got] preapproved through my credit union when purchasing a car. They said, ‘Wow! You are extremely rare. You have less than 1 percent DTI. You can get a loan for any amount,’” she recalls. “Of course, being a saver, I didn’t go crazy and buy a luxury car. Instead, I purchased a 2011 Jetta SEL for an outrageous price of $20,000. I will get my money’s worth out of it, though.”

When she was just sixteen, Mandy enrolled in a two-year drafting/design course at a local career center in 1996 that was being offered through J. L. Mann High School. The program allowed her to work in her chosen field for a few hours every morning earning $12 an hour and earn academic credit while completing her course work in the second half of the school day.

That training put her in good stead for her future and she found work doing geospatial mapping for AECOM in 1999. She’s been there for almost fourteen years now. Over the years, she also put herself through Greenville Technical College as she continued working full-time—all while pulling double duty as a caregiver to her father (1998–2001) and her mother (2007–2010).

Ever the high achiever, she graduated in May 2010 with a 4.0 GPA!

Today Mandy earns about $70,000 annually, which includes income she gets from seasonal part-time work as a whitewater raft guide and a disc jockey on some weekends. In addition, she volunteers her time working with animal rescues and in senior homes, and helping those who are struggling in today’s economy to get back on track.

“I call these side jobs my ‘escape’ jobs. They provide fun and entertainment, I get to interact with the public (which I love), and it’s ‘me’ time.”

Mandy’s ultimate goal is to open an independent-living care home for seniors.

“I see a great need and desire to give personal attention to our dearly beloved elders who’ve experienced life and have all but been forgotten about. We have so much to learn from our elders and I don’t want to lose sight of that. I want to love on them, care for them, and provide for them for the rest of their days,” she says.

“That’s important to me—it’s in my heart. In fact, I’ve created my business plan and have met with a SCORE counselor to get this goal moving forward . . . the seniors need me and my heart needs them.”

For those who don’t know, SCORE is the Service Corps of Retired Executives, a group of retirees from corporate backgrounds who so love capitalism that they dedicate their time to help fledgling entrepreneurs realize their dreams.

Mandy’s story points at the importance of having good guidance in your life, whether it’s to help you reach retirement savings goals or craft a business plan.

“I find it extremely important to have mentors in your life—financial mentors, spiritual mentors, career mentors, and personal mentors. I pick my mentors wisely, as I desire much for my life.

“I have tendencies, at times, of not being a very patient person, as I’m a go-getter. I’m active and go at everything full force. I give my all in all that I do. In order to stay the course, I have to remind myself, ‘Silent endurance!’”

What can you learn from Mandy’s story if you’re saving for retirement?

Gain financial literacy before it’s too late.

• A new study from PNC Bank shows twenty- and twenty-one-year-olds have an average debt of $12,000. But by the time they reach twenty-eight or twenty-nine, the average person’s debt load balloons to $78,000.
• Half of the debt load is student loans. Another quarter is credit cards. That’s followed by car loans and mortgages. At the core of the problem is the level of financial literacy of our young people. Even whiz kids who work on Wall Street are clueless when it comes to everyday money decisions.
• If that sounds like you, you need to educate yourself. Try a free site like YoBucko.com that offers financial advice specifically geared to twentysomethings.

Never miss your money.

• Want to have more money in retirement? Switch to autopilot when contributing money to a retirement, investment, or savings account each pay period.
• It’s easy to do this through a 401(k) at work; your employer simply diverts funds that you save in pretax dollars. But if you have an IRA, a Roth IRA, a SEP (simplified employee pension), or something similar, you might have to mark a date on your calendar every month or every pay period when you initiate an electronic deposit of funds to your account.
• If you can manage to pay yourself or your retirement first before you do anything else with your money, it’s much easier to reach your financial goals.

Find a money mentor.

• I can’t stress the importance of having the right money mentor in your life. It can be Dave Ramsey, Suze Orman, me, or any of a host of other financial gurus. Having the right guidance can make all the difference.
• Mandy says she picks her mentors carefully and I’m proud to have her call me one. “I don’t often share my goals with those who are not my mentors, as I don’t want to be discouraged in my desires,” she tells me. “Everything is within reach and it’s up to me to get there . . . and that I will.”
• And remember, there really are no magic bullets that anyone can offer you that are going to make you insta-rich. While it isn’t sexy to talk about compound interest and plain vanilla index funds, they do get the job done over time!

Get control of your money—no matter what it takes.

• Saving for retirement might seem hard, but it doesn’t have to be. The first thing to address is how to get a real tactile sense of your money in a world of ATMs, auto-drafts, and debit cards, where money management has become so abstract that we’ve lost control.
• The brainiacs at MIT have developed a series of wallets that buzz when you spend money, become progressively harder to open as your money dwindles, and actually shrink in size as your account balance lowers!
• Working prototypes of what are called the “Proverbial Wallet” by product designer John Kestner “communicate with a cell phone through Bluetooth, using its data connection to get financial information from the user’s bank accounts.” JohnKestner.com has a video of these devices with the promise that “a commercial version is in early development.” You can also sign up for updates. Hey, whatever it takes to get the job of saving done, right?