If You Can
William J. Bernstein promises to lay out an investment strategy that any seven year old could understand and will take just 15 minutes of work per year. He also promises it will beat 90% of finance professionals in the long run, but still make you a millionaire over time. Bernstein is addressing young Americans just embarking on their working careers. Bernstein advocates saving 15% of one's salary starting no later than age 25 into tax-sheltered savings plans (IRA or 401(k) in the U.S., RRSPs or Registered Pension Plans in Canada), and divvying up the money into just three mutual funds: a U.S. total stock market index fund, an international stock market index fund and a U.S. total bond market index fund. For millennials, saving 15% of salary is the financial equivalent of dying, which is why Bernstein titles his document 'IF you can.'
Stats for nerds
9recommend
10mentions
9people
2016–2024years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- More of a pamphlet than a book, I give it to all the college graduates in the family.
- I recommend “If You Can”. It’s an short, accessible and entertaining guide to self-managed passive investing targeted to millennials.
- If You Can: How Millennials Can Get Rich Slowly
By William Bernstein
- "If You Can" by William Bernstein is a free, meant-to-be simple primer on investing aimed at Millennials:
- If you don't know who Bogle is, and don't know much about individual investing for retirement, I would recommend you read William Bernstein's If You Can, a (free!) little 16-page booklet that just lays out the "Bogle method" for simple investing for retirement.
- If you like that, I would also read Chapter 1 of Bernstein's Four Pillars of Investing. Bernstein's books are all more or less re-writes of the same book multiple times in an attempt to make the Bogle/indexing idea approachable for different audiences. In addition to If You Can, Chapter 1 of Four Pillars is a history of securities returns and is the best thing I've ever read in terms of getting into the right head-space for long-term investing and thinking about risk.
http://www.efficientfrontier.com/t4poi/Ch1.htm
The rest of the book is good, too, but you can just read If You Can instead.
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