Your House Won't Pay for Your Retirement . . . bu

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A first look between the covers of the soon-to-be-released book Trump University Wealth 101
Don’t make the all-too-common mistake, popularized in recent years, of thinking that your home is your best investment and that it will pay for your retirement. Your home may well be your biggest asset,karen millen, and it contributes a lot to your peace of mind. But just because the price you can get for it today or in the future may be much higher than you paid, it doesn’t mean you’ve made a big profit. Reason: A home costs much more to buy and operate - out of pocket, year after year, aside from tax benefits - than most people realize because of mortgage interest, taxes, insurance, repairs, renovation, and so on. Plus, home prices don’t always go up over time.
Seven Smart Ways to Invest for Retirement
So if your home cannot reliably pay for your retirement, what is your fallback plan? I want to put you on the right path toward achieving a wealthy lifestyle in retirement - whenever that may be. For over 26 years, I’ve been helping people build a strong financial foundation for retirement. All too often, I’ve seen them make mental mistakes that lead to all sorts of financial fiascos.
Here are my retirement rules for steering clear of disasters:
1. Don’t “play the market.” Investing for your financial security is serious business. In my view, the first and most important step to take is to adopt the right attitude. By that I mean how you view the world of investments and the financial markets.
2. Learn to manage risk. Recognize what can go wrong. Actively lower your risk exposure when necessary, but also get more aggressive when market conditions turn very favorable, which means risk is low. Controlling risk - not trying to beat the market - should be your guiding objective.
3. Control your emotions. Investors who get into trouble typically become too enthusiastic when prices are rising and/or they panic when prices are sinking. Things are rarely as good as the blind optimists say, and almost never as bad as the professional pessimists would have you believe.
4. Recognize that the investment markets themselves are not always rational. They incorporate the knowledge and feelings of the world’s investors on a daily basis, so they reflect the ongoing battle of those two all-too-human emotions, greed and fear.
5. Pay close attention to the message of the markets themselves, and much less to the news headlines, market pundits, or TV talking heads. How the markets react to external developments is much more important that the instant analysis of the “experts.”
6. Accept the fact that investing is more art than science, and that you’ll often be wrong. But try to learn from your inevitable mistakes so that you don’t make the same ones over and over.
7. Focus on the long term, not on daily fluctuations. The longer your time horizon, the more likely it is that you’ll stay calm and be right about an investment. The shorter your investment time period, the less likely you are to make and keep investment profits.
Philip A. Springer is one of the expert authors selected by Donald J. Trump to contribute to the new book Trump University Wealth Building 101, due to arrive at your bookseller in just a few weeks. Philip is president of Retirement Wealth Management, Inc. and a leading authority on building and enjoying a rich retirement. From 1995 to 2001, Philip was editor of The Retirement Letter, a leading national source of independent information and advice. A popular speaker at investment conferences and on investment cruises, Philip has been interviewed on CNBC, CNN, and written articles for or been quoted in many national publications, including Business Week, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.