How to Maximize Your Retirement Savings

In Six Key Principles of Saving for Retirement, Ben Stein details the six principles that will help you maximize your retirement savings. They are:

1. How much you save.

2. How long you give your savings to compound.

3. How you allocate your assets.

4. How much your investment returns annually.

5. How low you keep your fees and costs.

6. How closely you keep an eye on taxes.

My thoughts on these:

1. I've written on these topics before, so there's no need to cover them in a new post. But for those interested in details, here are some links you'll be interested in:

• How to Retire Rich: Use the Power of Compounding

• The Richest Man in Babylon, The Power of Compounding

• The Richest Man in Babylon, The Power of Time

• What is Investment Rebalancing and Why You Need to Do It

• Costs Matter If You Want to Maximize Investment Returns

2. To me, #3 and #4 and #5 and #6 should be combined. Both #3 and #4 deal with maximizing your total return on the "earning" side while both #5 and #6 deal with maximizing your return by keeping various costs as low as possible. In fact, you could combine all four into one tip that simply said "maximize your investment return."

3. These reasons are why I invest in index funds.

4. In a nutshell, save as much as possible for as long as possible with the highest return as possible.

Comments

[Wealth Building Lessons]

Ben Stein is awesome.

getting my friends and cousins to save for retirement is like pulling teeth sometimes.
either they get it or they don't.