I'm on a 20+ year time horrizon. COP could drop 50% overnight and I would not loose any sleep at this stage of the game.

Here's what I thought was a good and informative read supporting the primary objectives of this thread: http://seekingalpha.com/article/2956...ly-maybe?ifp=0

On a side note, at 56 years old and 6 to 10 years away from cost effectively accessing retirement funds it's somewhat frustrating knowing my body is not going to perform at a level that allows me to do what I really enjoy doing at a level that makes it rewarding.......strength and reaction times are all starting to atrophy to a degree. Thus it's frustrating knowing I won't genuinely enjoy the activities at levels I consider respectable. Senior Tour Golf would be one simple example, the qualifying age is 50 and you don't see many competitive seasoned players over the age of 60......their second 'prime time' before they start sunseting is between 50-56 years old. Not 62.5-66 or maybe 70+ if the government continues leveraging.

Moral of the story, start young, resist superficial spending, invest aggressively, and set your retirement target earlier than 62.5 or 66 years. If you can pull it off you'll improve the quality of your retirement. :thumbsup:

Sieg, I'm 48...and this is a common discussion with my wife (shes 5 years senior of me) all of the time. Back in my 20s, I used to say I'd like to retire at age 45. At that time, I didn't have a clue what it would take, I was young, dumb and full of...well I was enthusiastic...

Over the years I've had times where I thought that was absolutely possible and had times where I was afraid that I'd lose everything and never be able to retire like I want. Not having any children has sped our ability to retire early up no doubt, along with good earnings early on, saving responsibly and smart spending choices along the way.

Having lost some family and friends unexpectedly early in recent years, retiring early is on my horizon once again...I'm in the I want to enjoy it now and would rather be broke when I'm 70 than scrimp through the next 20 years saving for when I'm 70 and too old to enjoy the fruits of my labor mode. The hard part is two fold, wondering if I really can afford to enjoy it now and the price I'll have to pay as the majority of our retirement funds are in tax deferred accounts which will be costly to access for the next 20 years.

The graph in the article you linked reminds me of the graph I looked at when making my first real investment when I was 21 years old, a cash value life insurance policy. To this day, still the best investment I've ever made. My advisor call it a reverse IRA and we used the $2000 a year figure as well as that was the IRA deduction limit back then. Good part of that investment for me is, I can borrow against that cash value sitting there long before I turn 70 fee free. That's my ace in the hole towards early retirement.

START EARLY!!!

hahaha

NICE!


As to the retiring early, thats a really great article, and hope I am making strides toward that goal

I'm 42 so a little behind you but not by much. I just wish I had followed through with my plans to retire early I had when I was in my mid 20's and started learning about retirement. :shakehead:

It's all about the journey, fellas. Waiting to live until you can retire is not a great philosophy, what if you don't make it? The opposite isn't any better. You end up living off social security and not dictating your own life when your age exceeds your money.

A life of balance is preferable. My goal is to get to a point where I can work for the passion and be able to give $ graciously. Imagine getting to a point where you can give away 25%, 50% or more of your income.

13 Quotes out of Buffett's Letter
 

These are pretty good.

Buffett’s 2014 letter: Corporate cancers, preachers of pessimism and lessons of history

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — He’s at it again.

In his annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway BRK.A, -0.48% BRK.B, -0.63% shareholders, Chairman and Chief Executive Warren Buffett continues his tradition of delivering all sorts of cleverly worded musings on the markets, on the state of American business and on his own quirks and peculiarities (and how they affect his relationship with longtime Berkshire vice-chair, Charlie Munger.)

If you have the time, it’s always worth reading the whole epistle. If not, we’ve settled on 13 of the choicest quotes.

“At Berkshire, we much prefer owning a non-controlling but substantial portion of a wonderful company to owning 100% of a so-so business. It’s better to have a partial interest in the Hope Diamond than to own all of a rhinestone. “

“My successor will need one other particular strength: the ability to fight off the ABCs of business decay, which are arrogance, bureaucracy and complacency. When these corporate cancers metastasize, even the strongest of companies can falter.”

“In the world of business, bad news often surfaces serially: You see a cockroach in your kitchen; as the days go by, you meet his relatives.”

“Who has ever benefited during the past 238 years by betting against America? If you compare our country’s present condition to that existing in 1776, you have to rub your eyes in wonder. In my lifetime alone, real per-capita U.S. output has sextupled. My parents could not have dreamed in 1930 of the world their son would see. Though the preachers of pessimism prattle endlessly about America’s problems, I’ve never seen one who wishes to emigrate (though I can think of a few for whom I would happily buy a one-way ticket).”

“The unconventional, but inescapable, conclusion to be drawn from the past fifty years is that it has been far safer to invest in a diversified collection of American businesses than to invest in securities — Treasuries, for example — whose values have been tied to American currency. That was also true in the preceding half-century, a period including the Great Depression and two world wars. Investors should heed this history. To one degree or another it is almost certain to be repeated during the next century.”

“Market forecasters will fill your ear but will never fill your wallet.”

“If you’ve attended our annual meetings, you know Charlie has a wide-ranging brilliance, a prodigious memory, and some firm opinions. I’m not exactly wishy-washy myself, and we sometimes don’t agree. In 56 years, however, we’ve never had an argument. When we differ, Charlie usually ends the conversation by saying: ‘Warren, think it over and you’ll agree with me because you’re smart and I’m right.’”

“We will never play financial Russian roulette with the funds you’ve entrusted to us, even if the metaphorical gun has 100 chambers and only one bullet. In our view, it is madness to risk losing what you need in pursuing what you simply desire.”

“Business models based on the serial issuances of overpriced shares — just like chain-letter models — most assuredly redistribute wealth, but in no way create it. Both phenomena, nevertheless, periodically blossom in our country — they are every promoter’s dream — though often they appear in a carefully-crafted disguise. The ending is always the same: Money flows from the gullible to the fraudster. And with stocks, unlike chain letters, the sums hijacked can be staggering.”

“At a healthy business, cash is sometimes thought of as something to be minimized — as an unproductive asset that acts as a drag on such markers as return on equity. Cash, though, is to a business as oxygen is to an individual: never thought about when it is present, the only thing in mind when it is absent.”

“(We) frequently get approached about acquisitions that don’t come close to meeting our tests: We’ve found that if you advertise an interest in buying collies, a lot of people will call hoping to sell you their cocker spaniels.”

“Berkshire’s yearend employees — including those at Heinz — totaled a record 340,499, up 9,754 from last year. The increase, I am proud to say, included no gain at headquarters (where 25 people work). No sense going crazy.”

“Though practically all days are relatively uneventful, tomorrow is always uncertain. (I felt no special apprehension on December 6, 1941 or September 10, 2001.)”

The man is brilliant. I have a friend that is on the Berkshire board - she is also brilliant. Smart people surround themselves with other really smart people.

there's an old saying I always remember told to me about surrounding yourself with others.....

If your the smartest guy in the room.....then your in the wrong room

what do you guys think about investing in the players in the "Cable wars"?

I was reading an article about cutting the cable and investing.

They were talking about how some invest in the big cable companies (comcast, att etc)

and some invest in the new comers who are looking to disrupt the cable industry (google with fiber, netflix, hulu, amazon etc)

But they were saying to instead invest in the content providers, since no matter who wins the battle to get the consumer the content, the content providers will still be there making money.

I was looking at FOX, AMC, VIA and DISCK

I watch a ton of programming on the channels under the Discovery umbrella and they look decent on the chart.

Thoughts?