A Rich Life

The Old Ideas on Saving & Investing Don't Work -- Here's What Does

“You Need Either to Point to the Page in the Greaney Retirement Study Containing a Valuation Adjustment or Join Me in Insisting That He Correct the Error Immediately.”

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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 are not a millionaire, you don’t have thousands posting and VII failed.  It has been 2 decades of failure.  What more do we need to see?

You need either to point to the page in the Greaney retirement study containing a valuation adjustment or join me in insisting that he correct the error immediately.

Rob

Comments

  1. Did you know that only 4.7% of American’s have saved at least $1 million and only 1.8% have $2 million? The REAL crisis is that people do not have enough money in their savings/investment accounts (just like you). Let’s talk about what the REAL error is.

  2. From May 1999 through May 2002, I posted only about saving strategies. I was a highly popular poster. Greaney wrote an introduction to the Retire Early board urging newcomers to read all of my ‘seminal” stuff first. I had never had an abusive post directed to me at that time.

    So there’s a sense in which I would love to re-focus on saving strategies. But you can’t do that forever. Once people save enough money to become financially independent, they need to do something with the money. Should they go pure Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold? Or should you tell them about the last 44 years of peer-reviewed research? If you tell them about the research, there is a segment (about 10 percent) of the Buy-and-Hold community that is going to be very unhappy with you. And the other 90 percent may speak up once or twice but they are not going to be willing to tale on the Goons in any sort of sustained way.

    So you end up where we are today. I would prefer to write about saving. But sooner or later you need to address investing issues if you are going to have a board that helps people to achieve financial freedom early in life. I didn’t wake up one morning and say ‘Gee, I think I would like to write about investing.” I got forced into it against my will because I had made friends with a number of people who were planning early retirements and i was concerned that they were making use of a retirement study that gets all of the numbers wildly wrong (the Greaney study lacks a valuation adjustment).

    Investing matters. Saving matters too, maybe more. But in the final analysis, investing matters as well.

    Rob