Invest in You: Part 1

As suggested in the previous post, you will not be able to "save your way out of trouble."  The financial difficulty that you face in terms of a lack of investment sustainability for your future is your doing, and now you will need to fix it!

For the first installment, I've revisited some logic and common sense available at no charge to everyone, via Altucher Confidential.  James writes one of the best blogs available on the web, mixing his entrepreneurial flair with his down to earth writing style.  In a recent post James offered this opinion:

I don’t care how much you set aside for your 401k. It’s over. The whole myth of savings is gone. Inflation will carve out the bulk of your 401k. And in order to cash in on that retirement plan you have to live for a really long time doing stuff you don’t like to do. And then suddenly you’re 80 and you’re living a reduced lifestyle in a cave and can barely keep warm at night.

The only retirement plan is to Choose Yourself. To start a business or a platform or a lifestyle where you can put big chunks of money away. Some people can say, “well, I’m just not an entrepreneur .”

This is not true. Everyone is an entrepreneur. The only skills you need to be an entrepreneur: an ability to fail, an ability to have ideas, to sell those ideas, to execute on those ideas, and to be persistent so even as you fail you learn and move onto the next adventure. Or be an entrepreneur at work. An “entre-ployee”. Take control of who you report to, what you do, what you create. Or start a business on the side. Deliver some value, any value, to any body, to somebody, and watch that value compound into a career (sic).

In my post "U.S. Retirement Woes" I added some simple math - unless you have about $1,000,000 saved AND you are able to live comfortably with a return of around $70,000-100,000 annually, your 401(k) and similar investments may not sustain you during 20-30 years of "retirement."  Of course, that also assumes that people aspire to retiring at e.g. 65, and may live to e.g. 85-90.

You only have two high level - or macro - alternatives to the Retirement Fix challenge: either significantly increase your net asset value, or reduce your spending (or both). 

So, with this first installment of the Retirement Fix, the proposal is simply this: think beyond your current job, find value that you can deliver, and execute on that... i.e. if you deliver value for a commensurate fee, you will be able to derive another source of income, or multiple sources.  Executed successfully, this could mitigate the financial sustainability risk inherent in your inadequate savings/investment value today.

In the next few posts, we'll explore some more concrete Retirement Fix ideas, focused mostly on increasing your net asset value.   

Only you have the ability to control, manage and decrease your spending!