Save Smart for a Secure Future: The Essential Guide to Achieving Your Retirement Dreams

William Spitz has written a well organized easily understood guidebook on saving for retirement. Among the topics covered are a run down on the basics of retirement plans, formulas for determining how much you should be saving to meet your retirement goals, a review of investment fundamentals, an interesting look at investment risk, and how to create a portfolio and select appropriate mutual funds. Each of these topics are discussed in clear and concise language and illustrated with relevant charts and graphs. The section on risk and and the section on creating an investment portfolio interested me the most.Spitz restates the well documented correlation between investment risk and reward and attempts to put it in proper perspective for those who are in the process of saving for retirement. Briefly, he cites five factors which must be considered when evaluating investment risk. They are time, human capital, financial responsibilites, other resources, and emotional makeup. For each factor he discusses important considerations and provides some guidelines to help in understanding.The section on creating an investment portfolio is interesting and well done. He introduces the theory of the optimization process an its use in selecting appropriate investment choices. He presents four recommended portfolios and discusses them based on risk/reward projections.This is a nice guide to saving for retirement. I have a feeling I will be using it fairly often when I need to refresh my memory on some important basics of saving and investing.