Highlights

This page highlights what we believe are some of the more important thoughts and takeaways from our website that we think visitors should consider.

    1. Learn about the main factors that are crucial to accumulating wealth.
        1. See our Introduction to Accumulating Your Fair Share of Wealth.
    2. Invest today to prosper tomorrow – don’t procrastinate and waste your most valuable asset, time. As shown on our Retirement – Savings page and in Table 8 on our Prosper Tomorrow page, the decision not to save and invest in your twenties could cost you over €0.5 million in the long run! Time can be a very good friend indeed when it comes to your wealth, but you ought to make friends with it as early in life as possible.
    3. Invest enough from young enough.
        1. Our calculator will help you figure out how much you need to invest to achieve your wealth goals and sample results are available on our Prosper Tomorrow page.
    4. Even if your income is modest, you can still accumulate meaningful wealth during your lifetime.
        1. See Table 1 on our ‘Retirement – Savings’ page and consider that if your gross annual income is €20,000 and you contribute 15% of it to your retirement savings account and your employer contributes 10%, there’s a 50-50 chance that you could accumulate in the region of €1 million in 45 years time.
    5. Try to contribute enough to your retirement savings account so that you receive the maximum amount your employer is willing to contribute.
        1. If possible, try to contribute 15% of your gross income to your retirement savings account on top of what your employer is willing to contribute.
        2. However, if you are unable to contribute 15% initially, use the Save More Tomorrow approach to increase the percentage that you save as your income increases over time.
        3. Have a look at Table 4 on our ‘Retirement – SSIA Comparison’ page to see how you could actually end up receiving €4 or more for every €1 you save.
        4. Consider the performance of the Buy & Hold investment approach compared to the average Irish pension fund here.
    6. As Albert Einstein would have recommended, keep it simple.
        1. The simplicity of the Buy & Hold investment approach should serve you well throughout your lifetime despite the inevitable ups and downs, and you may follow our real money Buy & Hold accounts to guide you along the way.
    7. Rather than panic and sell, stock market declines are in fact an opportunity to buy more. To quote Warren Buffett, “Whether we’re talking about socks or stocks, I like buying quality merchandise when it is marked down.”
    8. Many children born today could live to reach 100. Over the 100 years from 1920 to 2020, $100 invested in the U.S. stock market would have grown to around $70,000, even allowing for annual costs of 1%, and despite the 1929 Wall St. Crash, the 1930s Great Depression, the Second World War, the 1970s Oil Crisis, 1987’s Black Monday Crash, the 2000 Technology Bubble, the 2008 Great Financial Crisis and the 2020 Covid-19 selloff.
    9. Leaf through some of the articles in the Miscellaneous section of our library at your leisure, especially those penned by Warren Buffett.
    10. Stock Market or Lottery? The numbers simply don’t add up for the lottery.
    11. Prepare to be unlucky, but hope to be lucky, and you’ll be unsurprised by anything in between.