Sure-Fire Investment Advice

August 4, 2009

Interview with Frank Armstrong, author of Save Your Retirement
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Mike Carruthers:
If you want to know the secret to financial security it's simply this: You have to spend less than you earn and save the difference.

Frank Armstrong:
I hate to sound like your mother but if you don't save, all the world's best financial advisor can do is confirm that you're going to be poor.

Financial adviser Frank Armstrong, author of the book Save Your Retirement, who is, by the way, one of the 100 best financial advisers according to Barron's, says for a long time things have been a little out of whack.

If you look back at the historical savings rates up through about 1993 we had an eight to ten percent per year savings rate. After that we became the credit card nation and started refinancing our houses to finance our vacations and it went to zero or below. Now, in the last few months we've had a little spike - nobody knows if that's permanent. We've seen spikes before but when you don't save anything and you're looking forward to thirty or so years in retirement I kind of wonder how you're going to finance that. So being responsible means beginning to start to save and invest wisely.

And investing wisely still includes the stock market.

The stock market comes with risks but it also comes with extraordinarily high returns over time. And yes we had a bad two years but that's an aberration and the long-term results in the stock market have proved it to be one of the greatest wealth generating mechanisms of all time.

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here.