Plan Your Prosperity: The Only Retirement Guide You'll Ever Need, Starting Now--Whether You're 22, 52 or 82

Chapter 8

Putting It All Together

By now, you’ve read the entire book (hopefully) and understand some key guiding principles for selecting an appropriate benchmark for your retirement investing plan.

And no, there’s no benchmark recommendation in this chapter either. Sorry—I did warn you. Instead, this chapter pulls together each chapter’s high points as a reference to guide you.

I’ve given you some principles and concepts for selecting a benchmark—you must now use them to determine for yourself what’s appropriate without succumbing to rules of thumb that may sound commonsensical but can actually harm you long term. Or you can use this as a guide to improve your communication (and hopefully, the results) with a professional. Up to you.

Picking an appropriate benchmark isn’t trivial. It’s yours for a good long while, unless something very major changes. Which is why I can’t give you a cookie-cutter solution. But if you put in the work—or work with a professional who understands the importance of selecting an appropriate benchmark and then managing against it—and if you remain disciplined to an appropriate plan, you can increase the odds you achieve your long-term goals. You can indeed get the prosperity you plan for.

It’s not easy. It’s quite hard! If someone tells you otherwise, they’re deluding you and/or themselves. But as I’ve said throughout the book, it’s not hard because it’s necessarily very tactically hard. It’s hard because your brain didn’t evolve to do investing easily. ...