Ben Stein, Phil DeMuth - Yes, You Can Still Retire Comfortably!

Yes, You Can Still Retire Comfortably!: The Baby-Boom Retirement Crisis And How to Beat It

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Money is an astonishingly powerful mind changer. Lots of it—or at least enough of it—makes you happy, while a shortage makes you miserable. There’s some magic to having enough that’s as basic as the need to take in water and oxygen. The “mojo” of having more than enough, of having an amount necessary to be comfortable, is intoxicating.

Just think about how you feel when you open a brokerage statement that says your investments have been doing well, and compare that with how you feel when it says they’ve been doing poorly. Imagine what it means to open an envelope and find a check instead of a bill.

Years ago, one of your authors, Ben Stein, got a call asking him to do a commercial for which he was to be paid what seemed like a lordly sum. He had lunch with a friend right after he took the call, and his friend asked if he’d had a face-lift. “No,” Ben replied, “I just got offered a lot of money to do something pleasant and easy.”

“Money,” she said sagely, “can make you look younger. Or,” she added ruefully (because she was short of money), “it can age you.”

We, your authors, are just ordinary people like you. We worry about money all the time, and whether we have enough of it. As we get older, we’re concerned about whether we’ve invested wisely. (We often haven’t, but we’re getting better with age … we hope.) Most of all, we think about whether we’ll have enough to live comfortably when we’re too old and infirm—or just too worn-out—to work, and whether the people we love will have enough. We’ve seen magnificent examples of retirement preparedness—especially in our parents, all of whom died far too young—but we’ve also seen disasters among people we’re very close to.

This has prompted very serious study on our part to save ourselves and others. We want to begin our salvation at home, but we’d like to spare as many people as possible sleepless nights and torment. We love this country more than words can say, and we’re devoted to our fellow American citizens, as well as those of the UK, Canada, and all good countries. We want to offer some help based on our own terrible experiences and terrifying observations, as well as what we’ve seen that works. That help is within these pages. If you read and learn from it, your chances for a successful retirement will rise markedly.