Excerpt: 'Million Not Enough'

In his new book, author Michael Farr aims to help you save enough money for your retirement.

Farr gives tips on how consumers can begin building $1 million in liquid assets they'll need to support themselves for the 20-plus years they'll survive after their retirement.

"A Million Is Not Enough: How to Retire With the Money You'll Need" offers tips for people in their 30s, 40s and 50s. While the goal may seem unattainable, Farr believes it's possible.

Read an excerpt below of this book below.

Introduction

A Million Dollars Isn't What It Used to Be!
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics ended on December 25,1991. I was there in June 1991, helping to lay the groundwork for that fall.

George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev were playing nicely. The heated Cold War rhetoric had cooled. Gorbachev had endorsed the idea of a stock exchange, and Bush offered to help. I'm not sure how the call to the CEO of Alex. Brown & Sons, the oldest investment banking firm in the United States, ultimately reached my desk, but it did. There I was, a thirty-year-old former high school teacher and now vice president of the old, revered banking firm, teaching communists how to be capitalists. In many ways I myself had just made that transition: from altruistic schoolteacher to Wall Street financier.

My Pan Am flight arrived in Moscow before heading on to Leningrad. We taxied to a lifeless-looking brown brick terminal, an enormous red flag emblazoned with yellow hammer and sickle billowing ominously overhead. As the plane stopped, a dozen young men in Soviet uniforms with machine guns ran toward us from all angles. They stopped in unison, stared at the windows with their angry, peach-fuzzed baby faces, and turned on their heels with their backs to us, keeping guard. The Cold War was still alive and well, and I was wondering if I had been sent because I was young and dispensable.

I lectured to three hundred people from the various Soviet states and Eastern Bloc countries for ten days. Their questions and desire for knowledge and information seemed insatiable. The tough part was teaching culture and not content. Intellectually, they understood me, but culturally, they did not. There were shortages of most staples in the USSR at the time, so I used a local example. I suggested, "If you are at the front of a long line to buy butter and are able to buy the last two pounds for two rubles per pound, you might declare yourself a butter broker and sell one of your pounds of butter for five rubles to the remaining crowd." The reaction of these nascent brokers was remarkable: They were outraged. "You would not do such a thing to a comrade." "In difficult times, all comrades should help one another." "A good Russian would share his butter with the rest of the crowd." Do you see the hurdle presented? For the rest of my examples, I suggested profiting from trade with other countries and profiting from investments from which your comrade would also profit.

The Soviets got it. The Moscow and St. Petersburg Stock Exchanges now boast some of the most sophisticated and successful traders in the world. If communists could overcome seventy years of opposite thinking, we can certainly take hold of our finances and become masters of our retirements. What about your culture? Did you grow up in a home that saved or spent? Your attitudes toward money will make investing easier or harder. This book will help. It's very hard to take responsibility for something that you don't understand. A Million Is Not Enough will empower you to understand the task of managing your assets, do the right thing, and enjoy the retirement you deserve.

The Million Mystique

For most of us who came of age in the years after World War II, the term millionaire has held a special place in our imaginations. We grew up revering "one million dollars" as a kind of mythic amount conferring on those who've attained it a sort of elevated status. Our parents thought of captains of industry when they pictured a millionaire; people like the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers embodied this concept for them. But we Baby Boomers were more likely to think of a millionaire as someone like Thurston Howell III and his wife, Lovey, from Gilligan's Island?the old-money, East Coast, pampered, privileged few who were more likely to be found on the society pages than the financial pages. However, our concept of who a millionaire is (and what constitutes wealth in the twenty-first century) has probably matured as we've aged. Entertainers, athletes, and CEOs have raised the bar of what it means to be rich in America, and we now realize that joining the ranks of the million-dollar club doesn't automatically entitle us to a life of luxury, champagne, and caviar?nor does it even earn us a place on the honorable mention list of Forbes magazine's wealthiest individuals. Put simply, a million dollars isn't what it used to be!