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

Plan Your Prosperity

Why is this book Plan Your Prosperity and not Plan for Prosperity? First, creating a retirement investing plan is very personal. Magazine surveys and static rules-of-thumb aren’t sufficient, in my view. Your benchmark (and, therefore, strategy) should be personal to you and driven by your circumstances and goals.

Second, like beauty, prosperity is in the eye of the beholder. What’s prosperity to you may not be to someone else. This isn’t about getting over some arbitrary line in the sand or my drawing one for you. This is about determining what you want to achieve, checking to see if it’s reasonable, then doing what you can to increase the odds you get there. That’s your prosperity.

It might mean saving $500,000 for retirement, $1 million, $7 million or $73.546 million. Whatever your view of prosperity, you need a plan.

You also need realistic expectations. If you earn $80,000 a year and spend $79,000, you likely won’t get to $73.546 million. It’s important to understand that now—so you can adjust your budget or get a higher-paying job or prepare your spouse for relatively reduced living expenses. Also, pie-in-the-sky expectations can hurt you much worse if you end up deceived by a financial Ponzi con artist. (More on that in Chapter 5.)

To get you to your plan for prosperity, the book walks you through how to think about some key issues. The final chapter consolidates the high points for easy reference later. A word of caution: You could skip to the end and ...