Financial Highway Column #7 — The Three Deadly Illusions of Stock Investing

I’ve posted Entry #7 to my monthly column at the Financial Highway site. It’s called The Three Deadly Illusions of Stock Investing.

Juicy Excerpt: We all have 40 years to finance our retirements, presuming that we start investing at age 25 and plan to retire at age 65. Stand still for 12 years and you have lost nearly one-third of the time available to you to achieve your goals.

If you were 30 percent down according to the numbers, you would be panicking today. The reality is that you are 30 percent down. It’s just that you are looking at the wrong number. You are looking at your portfolio value when you should be looking at how many years you have remaining to close the gap between your portfolio value and the amount you need to have saved on your planned retirement date.