A Chapter in My Late Start Retirement Journey
Looking back, that whole episode is what got me starting retirement prep with what was left after debt — money that had shrunk to a fraction of what it once was. At the time, it just felt like leftover change after paying off debt. Only later did I realize it was the actual starting point of my retirement savings.
While I was working in Korea and Germany, everything I knew about retirement planning came secondhand — things I’d overheard, never anything I’d looked into myself. I’d heard that beyond the pension systems the government required, some people also paid into private pensions on their own. But that always felt like a story about people from a different world than mine.
My paycheck barely covered day-to-day living as it was. Saving was out of the question, let alone insurance or a private pension.
That same pattern followed me to the US, and continued for a good while after I arrived.
Land That Had Been Tied Up for Years
My siblings and I jointly inherited a piece of farmland in Korea. It had been caught up in a government requisition plan for years, so we couldn’t sell it. The development plan kept getting postponed and revised, year after year, until at some point we just gave up thinking about it and let it fade from mind. More than a decade passed that way. Even among my siblings, the land stopped coming up in conversation. Everyone was busy with their own lives, and waiting on a plan that might never move forward had worn all of us down.
Then, out of nowhere, things moved with lightning speed, and the land was sold.
A lump sum was wired from Korea to the US.
A Few Days as a VIP
My bank reached out. It was the relationship manager I already knew personally — someone who’d introduced me to various products over the years. She mentioned a Money Market Savings account paying 4% annual interest at the time, and a premium account called Preferred Banking, then set up a meeting for me with the assistant branch manager. A few days later I went to the bank and met him, and received treatment I never expected: full VIP.
I’d never been treated that way at a bank before in my life. It felt a little awkward, but I won’t pretend it didn’t also feel strangely good.
That taste of luxury didn’t last long.
The Reality Was Somewhere Else
At the time, I was carrying a fair amount of debt — credit cards, a car loan, student loans, a Home Equity loan. To someone wandering through a maze of debt with no exit in sight, this money felt like rain after a long drought.
Just keeping up with the minimum payments across all those accounts each month was already a stretch. Pay one down and interest was piling up somewhere else. There was no room, in the middle of all that, to even think about saving or investing. So when I heard a lump sum had come in, debt — not investing — was the first thing on my mind.
After paying a significant capital gains tax, most of what was left went straight to paying down debt. I kept the Preferred Banking and Money Market accounts for about two months before closing them out. Those few days of VIP treatment turned out to be, in the end, a two-month arrangement.
What I Started With What Was Left
Once the debt was paid off, what remained in my hands was much smaller than what had originally been wired over. But with that shrunken amount, the best move I could find was opening a Roth IRA and a brokerage account.
Into the Roth IRA went $8,000 — that year’s base limit plus the catch-up contribution. The rest went into the brokerage account.
There was a reason I chose the Roth IRA first. I already had a 401(k) through work, but that was money moving automatically within a structure the company had set up. The Roth IRA was different — an account I opened myself, funding it with an amount I decided on my own. I also liked that since the money going in was already taxed, I wouldn’t have to worry about taxes on withdrawals in retirement. What was left over went into the brokerage account, where it could be managed more freely, outside the limits of a retirement account.
The goal I set for myself back then was simple: max out the Roth IRA contribution limit every single year until I retire.
Looking Back
It would be easy to see that money as something I simply spent paying off debt. At the time, honestly, that’s how it felt. But looking back now, that episode is exactly what pulled me out of a life where I treated “retirement planning” as someone else’s problem — and got me, on my own initiative rather than through the automatic structure of a 401(k), to start retirement prep with what was left.
The two months of Preferred Banking treatment are long gone, but the Roth IRA I opened back then is still here. And every year since, I’ve been working to max it out.
Looking back on it now, that land sat untouched for more than a decade, only to sell at exactly the moment I was drowning in debt. The timing felt too strange to be coincidence. Without that money, I’d probably still be somewhere in that maze of loans — and the words “Roth IRA” might still sound unfamiliar to me.
I still think about it sometimes: those few days of VIP treatment in front of the assistant branch manager, the stretch of debt repayment that followed, and finally, the small account I opened with what was left. None of it was planned. But somehow, that whole sequence is what brought me to where I am now — someone who, even starting late, has finally begun taking retirement seriously.