“The Comedian Is the Person Who Questions Whether Saving Millions of People from Suffering Failed Retirements Has Earned Compensation of a Very Big Multiple of $500 Million. If It Were Only One Million Retirements Saved, That Would Be $500 per Saved Retirement. There’s Not One Person on the Planet Who Wouldn’t Be Willing to Pay Far in Excess of $500 to Avoid Suffering a Failed Retirement.”

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:

You missed your calling as a stand up comedian.

Getting the numbers wrong in a retirement study is a pretty darn big deal, Anonymous.

It’s not just that Greaney destroyed the lives of thousands of people at the Motley Fool board who believed that his study was legitimate. Wade Pfau and I intended to get our research featured on the front page of the New York Times in the days before you Goons threatened him. We would have talked to the Times about the errors in the Trinity study (Wade wrote to the authors of the Trinity study about them), which was the study from which Greaney took the methodology used in his own study. There have been thousands of articles written about retirement planning that used the Trinity study as guidance. So the errors in that study put MILLIONS of retirements in jeopardy.

The comedian is the person who questions whether saving millions of people from suffering failed retirements has earned compensation of a very big multiple of $500 million. If it were only one million retirements saved, that would be $500 per saved retirement. There’s not one person on the planet who wouldn’t be willing to pay far in excess of $500 to avoid suffering a failed retirement. Getting the numbers in retirement studies correct matters. Big Time.

We are all going to need to pull together in the days following the next price crash. I have a funny feeling that our Wall Street Con Men friends are going to be looking for ways to restore credibility in the eyes of the general public to the investment advice field. I have offered to agree to a $500 million settlement to signal my willingness to help with that effort. It’s called being constructive, it’s called being cooperative. What a concept!

There’s nothing funny about a failed retirement. There’s certainly nothing funny about millions of them.

Serious Minded (When Its Comes to Retirement Planning!) Rob