THE NEW RULES OF RETIREMENT SAVING • 65
for retirement in ways that exposed them to all the risks in this book. And I hated it. Every parent wants better for their children than they have for themselves, and that includes retirement. I didn’t want my kids to reach sixty-five and think, “My IRA is just a big tax liability.” Being an actuary, I started analyzing different savings ap- proaches and vehicles, trying to see what offered the best balance of growth, security, and tax advantages. It took me several months. Then, one spring morning, as you’ll remember from earlier, my oldest daughter Rebecca came to my office to ask for help. First, I helped her figure out how much she should be saving. Then, we had to address the question: What should she be sav- ing it in? Well, all my research and analysis had paid off. I had something exciting to show her. Defining Success When I was earning my Master of Business Administration de- gree back in the 1980s, a popular notion was “defining success.” This was the process of answering one simple question: What does our experience look like if we’re successful in what we’re trying to achieve? So I asked Rebecca to define success for her retirement savings account. What benefits would an ideal strategy deliver? Together, we wrote out a list of everything an ideal retirement savings plan would have. She added some items, and I added some items. Here’s what we came up with.
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