Commencing year number 59.
It was my Birthday yesterday so I've been contemplating stuff. For one thing, if I had invested $1 per day in the stock market since the day I was born, today I would have $1,335,799.45. You know how they tell you to sponsor a kid in Africa for $1/day – why not sponsor your own grandchildren and make sure they will be Millionaires (inflation-adjusted) when they get to your age? A shortcut for that is to invest the first $3,650 to cover their first 10 years the day they are born and then add another $365 each birthday – you'll actually come out around $3M at 60.
That's all it takes to ensure your family's financial security and, if you pick nice dividend-paying stocks like AT&T (T), Pfizer (PFE), Walgreens (WBA), Coca-Cola (KO), IBM (IBM), Cisco (CSCO), 3M (MMM), Proctor and Gamble (PG), JP Morgan (JPM) and McDonalds (MCD) – you'll be nicely divesified in Dow components.
Reinvesting the dividends is key, by the way. Without doing that, you'd be at $400,000!
If your kids, like mine, are already in college and you missed the first 20 years of $1/day, don't despair, you can catch up by calculating how much money there should be using a Compound Rate Calculator and you can see where you should be after so many years by starting with $365 and adding $365 per year for X amount of years. So, at 20, my kids should have $27,142.60 – if they had saved nothing, that's what we'd need to catch up. $27,142.60 is the cost of not putting in $1 per day for 20 years ($7,300).
So, Advice #1 from the old man is stop building your wealth so you can "leave it to your children and grandchildren" and start actually doing something for them NOW. Setting up an account for them and letting them see how savings can make their money grow over the years is a lot more valuable than wrting them a lump-sum check after you're dead.
I was born in 1963 and the S&P 500 was down 8.81% in 1962 and, although Kennedy was assassinated in November of 1963, the market was up 22.6% that year. 1964 was the…
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