5 essential money tips for Generation X

It's not your imagination, Generation X. The financial pressure cooker heats up with every candle added to your birthday cake. Strike some measure of life and financial balance by making these essential money moves:

Shore up your financial foundation

Pay yourself first by skimming retirement savings off the top of your paycheck. Build an emergency fund big enough to cover the now-familiar financial gotchas of life. Have a plan to pay off any lingering student loans and high-interest debt.

Having your financial house in order becomes even more important as you couple up, have kids and acquire property.

Realign your priorities with reality

The key choice here is saving for college tuition vs. saving for retirement. Here, you have to look out for No. 1. If money is tight, your future financial stability should come first. One way to cover both retirement and college savings is to use a Roth individual retirement account. Withdrawals are allowed at any time and for any reason without taxes or penalties.

Embrace your age

Even the IRS wants to help you. The year you turn 50 you become eligible to save even more in tax-advantaged retirement accounts. .

Don't back away from risk

The closer you get to retirement age, the less exposure you should have to stocks. But don't overdo it. People in their early 40s may have 20 to 30 years of investing ahead of them before retirement. Based on the current investment mix in a Vanguard target-date retirement fund aimed at investors this age, having 87 percent of savings in stock funds might be appropriate at this stage.

Rethink retirement

Developing a road map for your future starts with calculating how much your current and projected income and retirement savings will provide. Our 20s — and 30s and 40s — may be behind us, but there are plenty of years ahead for compound interest, paired with subtle shifts in how we spend, save and invest to work its transformative magic.