About the author...

Paul is retired and living somewhere in New Jersey.  He has a Bachelors Degree in Mathematics and an MBA from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.  Paul understands all about numbers, yield, and compound interest.

When he first started working, Paul realized that he wouldn’t be a corporate executive.  He was bad at office politics, didn’t like to network, and had trouble with authority.  This last fact probably had something to do with being taught by nuns at a catholic school from the first to the eighth grades. 

Anyway, when Paul and his wife married in 1980, they sat down to figure out how they would make money.  Neither of them had a desire to work for a large company all their lives, so they knew they would never have a defined benefit retirement plan to live on when they were older.  They decided that the best way for them to accumulate wealth was to save as much as possible and invest in the stock market.  Luckily, 1980 was the start of a 20 year golden age for stock investors. 

Paul made mistakes at first, but he read everything he could about investing and investor psychology.  He realized that even the smartest people made dumb mistakes because they were acting on emotion rather than intellect.  He tried to train himself to take emotion out of his investment decisions.  He and his wife lived fairly frugally (his kids later called it living like cheapskates, but it’s just a matter of semantics). 

Paul and his wife bought a house in 1980.  House prices rose dramatically for the next 25 years. 

Because of the money he and his wife had saved and invested, the increase in the value of their house, and money Paul received from selling his small business, Paul was able to retire in 1997.  He kept reading and learning about investments and investor psychology.  The hardest thing he ever did was stick with his investment allocations through 2000 and 2002 when the entire financial world seemed to be falling apart.  So he knows first hand how difficult it is to hold your position when the world is crumbling around you.  A few years later he had made the money back, simply by sticking with his investment plan and rebalancing yearly.  At that point, he and his wife decided they needed a less stressful asset allocation, so he moved from 80% equities to 60% equities. 

Paul wanted to explain everything to his kids so they could be successful investors.  He knew they wouldn’t listen to him.  He spent the last four years looking for a book that his kids could use as their investment bible.  Most of the investment books he read gave really poor advice or very confusing advice.  Only a few authors gave good advice that was easy to understand.  But this advice was pretty generic, and not really targeted to Generation Y.  Paul decided to write his own book, geared toward Generation Y, so that his kids would have a strategy that worked and was easy to follow.  Here it is.

This blog is administered by Aron, a scientist who really likes money and is helping Paul get out his message.

We encourage questions.  Questions personally answered by Paul will be posted! 

Leave a comment, or email Paul directly at genyretirerich@gmail.com.