Plan Your Prosperity

In Plan Your Prosperity, Ken Fisher shows you ways to better prepare for retirement by planning ahead and being aware of investor pitfalls.

Ken hands you the tools and confidence you need to plan for retirement no matter what stage of life, or retirement, you’re in. Plan Your Prosperity can help you invest smarter and plan better, whether you’re in retirement, just getting ready to retire or 5 to 40 years out.

About the Book

In Plan Your Prosperity, Ken Fisher’s ninth book, he shows you why retirement investing isn’t different from any other long-term investing. Thinking otherwise may cost you dearly over time, perhaps long after your working years end. The book examines common investor traps and how you can overcome them, like picking an appropriate portfolio benchmark and starting to save as soon as you can.

The book gives you key principles designed to increase the odds you’ll reach your long-term goals. It also includes easy to follow exercises so you can better understand your current financial profile and estimate your future, inflation-adjusted cash flow needs.

Throughout the book, Ken highlights common investor pitfalls and shows you ways to sidestep them. His ninth book debunks the idea that retirement planning only matters at certain moments, arguing instead that retirement planning is essentially the same as financial planning. Whatever your age or investing goal, you’ll gain clear, useful advice you can act on. Get your copy today!

Ken Fisher, Founder, Executive Chairman and Co-Chief Investment Officer of Fisher Investments, is a self-made billionaire who ranks among America's wealthiest individuals. His prestigious Forbes “Portfolio Strategy” column ran from 1984 through 2016, making Ken the longest continuously running columnist in the magazine’s history.

Planning for Retirement

In Plan Your Prosperity, Ken Fisher shows you ways to better prepare for retirement by planning ahead and staying aware of investor pitfalls, including the investing myths that quietly derail solid plans.

Take stock returns as an example. Just because stocks have historically returned roughly an annualized 10% doesn’t mean they return 10% each year¹. Annualized returns are an average measured over long periods of time. Some years stocks may return much more, and other years they’ll fall further than that. Therefore, it’s unrealistic to think you can skim 10% off the top each year without hurting your portfolio’s long-term survivability. Ken calls this the “10% Myth,” and he covers it in more detail in the book, along with these other common pitfalls:

1. “Capital preservation and growth” as your investing goal—Not possible! Growth requires volatility. Capital preservation requires none. These two goals are not synonymous.
2. Age doesn’t equal asset allocation—A realistic look at your goals and objectives tells you much more about the right mix of stocks, bonds, cash and other securities than your age alone ever could.
3. Ignoring opportunity cost—Investors far too often underestimate how much growth they need because they fixate on just one kind of risk: volatility risk.
4. Unrealistic expectations—Not understanding what’s “normal” for stock returns can increase the odds you get scammed by a Ponzi con artist. Average returns aren’t normal. Normal returns are extreme.
5. The All-High Dividend Portfolio—Leaning primarily on high dividends and coupon payments is a potentially harmful way to generate retirement cash flow.

To help you avoid pitfalls like these, Plan Your Prosperity guides you through the proper steps of retirement planning, starting with selecting an appropriate benchmark. Picking the right benchmark is critical to long-term investing success, yet many investors never do it. Some don’t even know what a benchmark is or that they should have one! This book gives you the principles and concepts you can use to choose an appropriate benchmark for yourself, or to have more productive conversations with a professional.