About Paul Petillo

Paul Petillo is the Founder and Editor of BlueCollarDollar.com, and the author of numerous books including Mutual Funds for the Utterly Confused (McGraw-Hill, 2008), Retirement Planning for the Utterly Confused (McGraw-Hill. 2007), Investing for the Utterly Confused (McGraw-Hill, 2006), Building Wealth in a Paycheck-to-Paycheck World (McGraw-Hill, 2004). The information found there provides you with insightful looks into the mechanisms of finance, the inner workings of your investments, and the outcomes that you are looking for either as a seasoned investor or a novice.

His new book, Target2025: Ten Steps to Secure Retirement in Fifteen Years or Less is his most ambitious attempt to date.  Hoping to explain the world of investing as you see it, which is not necessarily how it really is, he will chart a path you have not yet traveled as a retirement investor.  Written in ten steps, he discusses behaviors and risk, how to build a portfolio with your individual needs in mind and how to maintain it to build the wealth you will nee to retire in fifteen years or less.

Here is an excerpt from the Introduction to the book Target 2025

Introduction: Forget What You Know… for a Moment

In the pantheon of four letter words, none portray as much confidence as the word sure.  Just uttering the word in response to a question will give the person posing the query the belief that whatever it was that was asked of you will be done.

According to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, the word sure is “marked by or given to feelings of confident certainty” as in “I’m sure I’m right”.  It also suggests an inner self-confidence that is “characterized by a lack of wavering or hesitation”. For example, my wife has a much more sure hand when it comes to putting paint on a wall than I do.

Sure is often thought of as an act of “admitting of no doubt” and offering “indisputable” testimony or evidence of a particular person’s position.  And of course, if you are sure, you know that something is “bound to happen”.  Oddly enough, the obsolete form of the word is at the basis of why we need to invest.  We believe that once we have invested we will be kept “safe from danger or harm” when in fact we simply feel safer because we have.  We know now that this is simply not the case.

But on the flip side, an admission of “not being sure” is not necessarily an admission to a lack of knowledge.  Perhaps you were unable to recall something for instance, the kind of information that will hit you about an hour later driving down the highway.  Not sure can be a misfiled piece of information tucked in the back of your head somewhere that, for one reason or another, just won’t come to you when you want it to. Not sure is how many of us feel.

In the books leading up to this one (Investing for the Utterly Confused, Retirement Planning for the Utterly Confused, and Mutual Funds for the Utterly Confused) the risk that comes with investing was explained as something that you assumed.  In other words, you bought into the product with the knowledge (gained after reading those guides!) that some risk you took was necessary to grow your money; that you needed to understand what that risk was and determine how much you were willing to take.

Theoretically, you can live without investing.  Your existence will be wholly reliant on your ability to generate income throughout your life and in doing so, have enough stashed away for times when you do not have the ability or strength to continue to work.  Because few of us can accurately gauge how those future moments will unfold, investing by its very nature helps us offset those risks by allowing us to take risks when we are younger, tempering them as we get older and with any luck, profiting from those decisions.

Along came 2001 and then 2008.  At that rate of disappointment, by the time 2025 arrives, we will have witnessed three to four more meltdowns, financial disasters that might be akin to a category five hurricane. Is there a way to disaster-proof your plans for retirement and do it in fifteen years, despite those possible pitfalls, roadblocks and economic insurrections?  Absolutely.