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    The Shortest Book Ever on Saving for Retirement: How to Make Every Dollar Count in any Financial Climate
    The Shortest Book Ever on Saving for Retirement: How to Make Every Dollar Count in any Financial Climate
    The Shortest Book Ever on Saving for Retirement: How to Make Every Dollar Count in any Financial Climate
    Ebook142 pages2 hours

    The Shortest Book Ever on Saving for Retirement: How to Make Every Dollar Count in any Financial Climate

    By James O'Donnell

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    About this ebook

    Most books on this subject try to scare (or perhaps bore) you into submission. The Shortest Book Ever on Saving for Retirement is different. It’s short, comprehensive, and most importantly of all—it’s understandable. By sticking to the bare minimum on what you really need to know about investing in your future, no matter the economic climate, James O’Donnell has provided the tool we all need and don’t yet have.

    There are plenty of books out there to confuse readers, make things seem financially hopeless, or present a quick fix to real financial struggles. This is not one of those books. Saving for retirement is a long-haul activity. But with the proper tools, guidance, and encouragement, anyone and everyone can do this.  This book uses simple, concise terms in a readable style to address the most crucial issues that affect your future financial health - whether you know it now or not!

    Finance Pro James O’Donnell has refreshed and updated the content of his 2008 book The Shortest Investment Book Ever to better reflect the brave, new economic world we find ourselves in. This new book, The Shortest Book Ever on Saving for Retirement, will replace the old book upon its January 2010 release.

    Look at these topics in a whole new light: Investing, Social Security, 401(k) and 403(b) accounts, Diversification, Mutual Funds, IRAs, and Annuities. Don’t stay lost. Read this book—it actually makes sense (and it will only take a couple of hours).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMoody Publishers
    Release dateJan 1, 2010
    ISBN9781575674179
    The Shortest Book Ever on Saving for Retirement: How to Make Every Dollar Count in any Financial Climate

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      Book preview

      The Shortest Book Ever on Saving for Retirement - James O'Donnell

      Author

      INTRODUCTION

      What Would You Do…?

      WHAT WOULD YOU DO if your loved ones were heading for disaster? If, say, they were driving around with bald tires or bad brakes? Maybe missing a couple of lug nuts on their front wheels?

      You’d warn them, right? Maybe help them get things fixed.

      But suppose instead of thanking you for your concern, they told you, What, me worry? I’ll be fine. Or maybe, I know what I’m doing. Thanks anyway for your kind offer.

      I spent a big chunk of my adult life working for some of the best money management companies in the world, helping to make rich (and not so rich) people richer. It was good work, it paid well, and it gave me the freedom to leave the rat race early and do something else—something I thought was more important. For me, that meant teaching at a small college in the Midwest, trying to help my students understand the ins and outs of business, money, and economics too. It’s been great work. It doesn’t pay as much as my earlier work did, but the opportunity to invest in the rising generation is worth more to me than another vacation or a second home at the beach.

      But you know what?

      It’s not enough. In spite of the satisfaction I gain from helping the next generation develop economic savvy, it’s not enough. I’m worried about this generation, even more so in the wake of the Great Financial Meltdown of 2008–09 just passed. Our nation—and its people—are facing a financial crisis of monumental proportions. There are millions of people approaching retirement who have nothing more than some digital photos stored up in their cameras to carry them through their Golden Years. They don’t realize what it takes to retire, and they don’t seem all that interested in finding help.

      Yikes!

      Few realize what it will be like to wake up each morning without enough to live on. Talk about bad brakes on an old car! Many of our fellow citizens imagine their retirement brimming with choices—fantasizing may be more like it. True enough, I do know some retired people who are living out their dreams, or devoting large blocks of time to charitable organizations, mentoring young people, investing in civic affairs, and volunteering for service overseas. Even in retirement, these people work as hard as the rest of us, and they love it. It’s one of the special rewards of careful preparation.

      But careful preparation for tomorrow means checking lug nuts today. It means stopping the car long enough to kick the tires and test the brakes.

      Many think Social Security will be enough. That it will be a reasonable fallback. I beg to differ. At some point in the near future counting on Social Security may be like watching for the Easter Bunny. There are better ways to spend one’s time.

      Like planning ahead.

      There’s no shortage of books or speakers on saving and retirement. But for most people, they don’t work. They’re like tent-meeting conversions with lots of conviction but little follow-through.

      The spirit may be willing, but the flesh … well, it just has to have its way. And it does—the way of irresponsibility and reckless spending. It hurts us again and again.

      So why am I adding one more book to encourage saving for later years? Well, maybe I’m just crazy, but I think we need a different kind of book. We need one that is short on jargon, charts, and mind-numbing details. We need one that helps us save where most of us save for retirement—at work, in payroll savings plans—but also covers options outside the workplace. Forget about return characteristics, terminal values, and discounted future cash flow. I think we need a book that, like Detective Joe Friday of the old TV show Dragnet, gives us just the facts.

      Maybe, just maybe, given my own experience in the business and in the classroom, I can write such a book for those of us who want just the facts on saving for retirement.

      Just the meat and potatoes, in other words.

      That said, I can’t make you read it carefully. Or, if you do read it carefully, I can’t make you apply its principles or change your spending habits. In other words, whether you are fearful, undisciplined, or uneducated in money matters, what I can’t give you—no matter how much I wish I could—is the kind of conviction that would STOP you in your tracks from being afraid of investing or of spending your brains out on comforts and consumption and start you, once and for all, onto the path of saving for your fast-approaching future—AND do so with a resolve so strong that it just might save your retirement years from misery and poverty. I want to give you that kind of conviction—as if saving money could stop an advancing enemy invasion in your backyard or cure you of a disease that is ravaging your body.

      Put still differently, what I used to do to make big money for wealthy people—and that I now teach my salt-of-the-earth Midwest students—that’s what I want to share with you in these few, concise pages.

      And all for the price of this little book.

      So, as the Book of Common Prayer says, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest these contents.

      Your own and your family’s financial future lies just ahead, around the next bend, so to speak. If you think, But this time, it’s different, it’s probably not. For sure, we are facing BIG problems. But we’ve faced bigger problems before. We survived and triumphed. Opportunity is born in the soil of disaster, just as disaster is nurtured in the complacency that everything is going fine. Investing demands discipline, knowledge, courage, and humility. Amid your fear—or spending—get ready to act intelligently, and learn how to invest for a brighter and more hopeful future.

      1

      "THIS TIME

      It’s (probably not) Different"

      FOUR LITTLE WORDS, but oh how much they tell us about financial markets and investors.

      Those words could be spoken or written anytime. For every moment is, after all, in some way, different from the moment before. But usually the words are heard in the later stages of unusually long periods of bullish euphoria or bearish gloom. For it is at just such a time, when everybody—including those who should know better—are certain that, "This time (now, fill in the blank with attention-grabbing headlines like breakthrough technologies or radically different tax policies) EVERYTHING’s different!!"

      At just such moments, it may seem that all nagging, past, irresolvable problems are now fixed, or—if things are gloomy—that all hope is now irretrievably lost.

      Which ever, the words this time it’s different do equally well, whatever the extreme of investor sentiment. And no matter how long the laws of nature or economics have been in operation, once we hear or see those four little words marking the long-awaited arrival of the Age of Aquarius—or the Apocalypse—RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!

      When you hear those four little words, be very, very wary. In other words, if the words come amid giddy euphoria, it’s probably time to sell whatever financial investment is causing the euphoria. And, if on the contrary, this time it’s different is heard at a time of unsearchable dread, you might want to buy some of whatever is the source of everyone’s depression.

      This is my first caution in a book about saving for retirement. Be wary of the euphoria OR the dread that says now is the time to invest big-time, or now is the time to bail.

      You think I’m kidding? I’m not. Let me give you some valuable history.

      This time it’s different was heard often back in 1999 and into early 2000. You may recall, back then, the US stock market, along with stock markets of most of the rest of the world, had been rising for almost two decades. Phenomenal! There seemed to be no end in sight to the opportunities to be had or the money to be made. Some investors in hot markets were using stocks for checking accounts. Plumbers and auto repair people were reportedly giving up their day jobs and becoming day traders.

      Commentators at many major news outlets uttered such nonsense as, This time is different because the dotcom and technology companies of the ‘New Economy’ don’t need money in the ways ‘Old Economy’ companies did. No way! For everybody knew that the New Economy (that meant companies like eToys.com Webvan.com and Boo.com—which, by the way, are not around anymore) didn’t need to borrow money, since their own stock was like money. And they could whip more stock out of their corporate wallets to buy other companies anytime they wanted to. And everybody knew that, this time, it would be different. Forever!

      Yet—funny thing—by the spring of 2000, New Economy companies were failing. Badly! And it wasn’t just their stock prices. No, hundreds of these New Economy companies just plain went out of business. A full 100 percent gone.

      Kaput!

      But the best of times are not the only times we hear, This time it’s different. Bad times, too—in fact, very, very bad times—work just as well, if not better, to stimulate such craziness. The late 1960s, for instance, and all of the 1970s, were pretty dismal times for investors. Inflation roared. An endless war in southeast Asia seemed increasingly futile and nationally divisive. College students took to the streets and, as well, took over some colleges. An American president resigned in disgrace. Stocks fell and went nowhere for about 18 years.

      By August of 1979, a now famous (or maybe infamous) Business Week cover screamed The Death of Equities! Inside, the story

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