Cook - Slash your retirement risk: how to make your money last with a simple, safe, and secure investment plan

Slash Your
Retirement Risk

How to Make Your Money Last
With a Simple, Safe, and
Secure Investment Plan

Chris Cook

Copyright 2017 by Chris Cook

All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright Conventions. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher, The Career Press.

SLASH YOUR RETIREMENT RISK
Edited by Jodie Brandon
Typeset by Diana Ghazzawi
Cover design by Ty Nowicki
Chair Image by iDesign/shutterstock,
Palm tree image by Firuz Salamzadeh/shutterstock
Printed in the U.S.A.

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THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED to my amazing family. Thank you to my two wonderful children, Meaghan and Patrick, for making it clear to me that you would never take care of me in retirement. Thank you to my incredible wife, Katie, for reminding me the children are only partially kidding. The many hours of study and development that went into creating a better approach to retirement investing would have never been possible without your motivation. My retirement is secure because of you.

THE PATH TO a healthy retirement nest egg has changed. Traditional buy-and-hold strategies that emphasize the return on your investments dont cut it anymore. Picking winners among blue-chip stocks or relying on high-interest bonds to generate enough money to last through retirement no longer carry the income guarantee they did in past generations.

Factor in todays global interdependent marketplace, our longer life spans, low interest rates, and extreme volatility in the markets, and without a shift in your approach to investing and saving, you very likely could run out of money in your lifetime.

Reliability of incomethe New ROIis what matters today. Retirement portfolios need to be managed using an investment strategy thats designed to make the most of your moneys ability to grow while protecting it from what have become the all-too-frequent downsides.

The strategy should minimize risks and eliminate the emotion-driven investment decisions so common with the worlds economic and political turmoil. And all this needs to happen while keeping costs and fees in check.

In our low-yield, rising-costs environment, investors simply cant afford not to invest in equities with their high-growth potential. The solution to slash your retirement risk, then, is to embrace a better strategy to equity investingone designed to enhance growth and preserve gains. The New ROI does all that and more. Its a simple approach to stock investing and retirement saving that you can do yourself or with the guidance of a financial professional that can have a long-range positive effect on your financial future, as well as your personal peace of mind.

Typical retirement investment approaches can be too risky because they concentrate only on return on investments to build financial gains, and balance that with conservative safe havens such as bonds, CDs, Treasuries, and annuities. Thats an outdated approach to generate gains and protect against losses, and fails to consider our low interest-rate environment and the dramatic ups and downs of todays markets.

From 2000 to 2015, the daily Standard & Poors 500 (S&P 500) lost more than 2 percent of its value a total of 192 times. That compares with the previous 50 years in which the index lost 2 percent or more of its value only 160 times. Volatility is the new normal.

Investors today must do whats necessary to protect their retirement portfolios from what can be devastating losses associated with these more frequent equity downturns. If not, relying on typical investing approaches easily can result in financial disaster in the future.

To truly build a solid nest egg, investors need to recognize todays market realities and learn to embrace a strategy that focuses on creating an income stream in retirement thats reliable, is consistent, and can last a lifetime. The goal should be to set up an investment portfolio that can accomplish growth and income reliability over the long term. Thats the New ROI equity investing strategy.

Looking to equities to generate a reliable income stream in retirement isnt a new concept. Most equities-based strategies, though, generally promise security based on what are inadequate asset allocations or diversifications, and may not be enough today to generate the income required to help guarantee long-term financial security in retirement.

Everyone, including people in or near retirement, must be prepared for todays wild market swings and potentially big losses that can accompany them. With the right moves now, your investments and money can survive the devastating downs and continue to thrive and provide the cash needed to live on later.

Todays right retirement strategythe New ROImeans optimizing risk and maximizing gains, even amid the constant turmoil of the global economic picture.

Your retirement portfolio must have the ability to capitalize on market upsides and, at minimum, be able to generate enough income to keep up with inflation. As unbelievable as it may sound, many traditional strategies today barely keep up. With interest rates still relatively low, the earnings on a 10-year Treasury struggle to keep pace with the average historical rate of inflationabout 3 percent. Plus, it takes much more than simply breaking even to grow a nest egg to meet your retirement needs.

Even if someone stuffs wads of cash under the mattress, unless that mattress is magical and can grow that cash by more than the average rate of inflation each year, future financial security can be a losing battle.

Slash Your Retirement Risk shows investors how to develop a sound investment plan that will take them comfortably through retirement. Although plenty of people talk about various elements of the New ROI equity-investing strategy, too often implementation comes up short. In these pages, youll find out why many other retirement investing approaches miss the mark and what it takes to make the New ROI work for you. Backed by mathematics and research from Nobel Prizewinning economists, investors, and experts, this scientific approach to equities investing can help provide your portfolio the results you need and want.

In these pages, youll learn what to do and why, and how to create your own portfolio with the New ROI approach, either on your own or with the help of the right advisor. Youll understand why traditional approaches arent enough.

I understand what can happen using the wrong approach to investing for retirement. As founder of Ohio-based Beacon Capital Management and a seasoned financial expert, I saw first-hand the financial devastation that so many people suffered after the Internet bubble burst in 2000. Thats when I decided successful investing for today and tomorrow had to include not only the potential for gains, but also a focus on what could happen with the downsides. Thus, the Beacon Capital Management equity investing strategythe foundation for the New ROIwas born.