I really want to be a millionaire. It’s interesting to see how people react to this when I say it out loud. Some look at me like I am crazy and others nod and say they have the same goal. Like many of the people that react with the you-are-crazy-that’s-impossible response, I also always thought that goal was crazy out of reach for most people (myself included). But about a year ago, I really started paying attention to personal finance and as I researched like crazy, things started to fall in place and I realized that there are tons of millionaires walking around in our everyday lives, we just don’t realize that they are because we’ve created a picture in our heads of what millionaires should look like and our idea of average humans just does not fit that picture.

Part of the reason that I took up the interest in personal finance and ultimately got to this change of mindset, was that I started listening to and fell in love with the Money Peach podcast. There were a few episodes that really stuck with me when I first started listening to it. Even though I’ve listened to almost every episode now, one of my favorites is from the very beginning “EP009: Can You Really Retire A Millionaire?”. Accompanying that, there is a great article on his blog called “Time vs. Money” which talks a lot about saving early and how much of a difference it can make. I also read (and highly recommend!) one of his favorite books, The Millionaire Next Door. The book talks about the habits of millionaires and how to what practices you can put in place to become one.

I love that Chris Peach has the mindset that “the best day to start saving for retirement is yesterday, the second best day is today”. When listening to his show, I never feel like I’ve messed up by not doing it sooner, just that I can improve by doing as much as I can now.

This brings me to the whole reason for this post. Something that I never realized until I started paying attention to personal finance is that you can contribute to your Roth IRA up until tax day. This might seem like something that isn’t important to note, but it was a game changer for me.

As hard as I try, I have not made it far enough in my career/salary range to be able to contribute the max to my retirement accounts (currently $5,500 for IRAs and $18,000 for 401ks) and at the same time live the life I want to spending-wise. But my goal is always to get there. Who knows what next year will bring. I for one hope it is a big raise that allows me to do just that. So in preparation for that day, I am paying extra attention to what year I contribute in. it I try to get as close to maxing out the previous year as I can and start the next contribution year with as much left to contribute as possible.

You have until the tax filing deadline (TODAY: April 17, 2018) to make a 2017 contribution. For next year’s taxes, you have from January 1, 2018, to April 15, 2019, to make a 2018 contribution. TODAY, Tax Day, is the most important day to check-in on that. Check your retirement accounts, see how much you contributed last year and how much you may have already contributed to next year in these first few months. If you have an auto deposit set up, it will automatically contribute the money to the current year even if you still have room in your contributions for next year. Luckily, with most banks, you can just call and ask them to move the money to post as a contribution for last year, but you have to do it today! Also, if you have not contributed at all and have some extra money laying around (put that tax refund to good use!) you can contribute to last year up until today. Again, hopefully we all get big raises next year and want to put that all into our retirement accounts. If that’s the case, we will love still having room in our contribution max for the remaining 8 months of 2018.

Anyone else have favorite tax day tips? What are you spending your tax refund on? Let us know in the comments!