Ted Alford

Pursue your retirement dreams while you are still young enough to enjoy them! Ted Alford, author of Charting an Early Retirement: Simple Planning and Investment Strategies, will show you how.

Starting in their thirties, Mr. Alford and his wife developed a twenty-year plan and managed to retire in just eighteen years in their fifties. They retired without any employer-provided pension or health-care benefits and without ever hiring an investment manager to oversee their financial portfolio. They accomplished their goal the old-fashioned way, by saving funds from earned income and investing those funds in both the stock and real estate markets. These days they can be found in the Bahamas, where they live part of the year aboard their 41-foot sailboat. When not sailing, they are in the US visiting with family and friends or traveling to interesting places around the world.

In Charting an Early Retirement, Mr. Alford provides detailed information on how to plan, save, and invest in an efficient way to make early retirement possible. Although he writes, “Starting early to allow time for savings to accumulate and investments to compound is the single most important factor to reaching one’s retirement financial goals,” his book contains information helpful to retirement planning starting at any age.

Mr. Alford spent 25 years seeking out everything he could find related to retirement planning, the financial markets, and real estate investing that he now shares with readers. His book consolidates into one resource the most important things he learned from his study and personal investing experience.

The concepts and strategies presented in the book are straightforward and easy to understand, providing a simple approach to reach your long-term financial goals. What are the most critical retirement planning concepts to understand? What are the best investment strategies to help reach your financial goals? Mr. Alford addresses these important questions and more.

Readers will learn:

•How the 2008-2009 financial crisis allowed the author to move up their retirement date by 2 years.
•A 4-step method to calculate a ballpark figure for your required nest-egg size at retirement.
•Whether you should use a financial or investment advisor.
•What percentage of your income you should save each year.
•How much of your retirement portfolio you should invest in stocks.
•Why controlling investment risk is as important as maximizing gains.
•How to sleep well at night in retirement regardless of equity market volatility.
•Using real estate investments to supplement your retirement income.

The author shares many online resources so readers can obtain more background on any particular subject to help create their own plan. The book’s many charts and graphs are clearly presented and discussed, so the information is enlightening instead of confusing.

Finally Mr. Alford reveals many details of their own 18-year early retirement journey on how they saved, invested, and strategized to make their dream a reality including investment failures as well as their successes. Charting an Early Retirement is an empowering book for anyone who would like to retire early!