Chapter 9
I Knew There Had To Be A Better Way

I’ve always been an optimist. In spite of all this bad news, bad things that have happened, bad trends and negative forces out there, I just knew there had to be a better way to prepare for retirement. There had to be something out there that would work far better than the program I was on.

Here are some of the things I did know:

• I knew I wasn’t getting any younger.

• I knew retirement was inevitability getting closer and closer.

• I knew retirement was coming, whether I was ready for it or not.

• I knew I did not want to be a Walmart greeter when I retired.

• I knew what I had been doing was not working so great.

• I knew if I expected to get different results, I would need to do things differently.

• I knew that the main-stream financial industry was rigged, and that I would never win playing their rigged game.

• I knew I didn’t want to risk participating in any more massive market crashes.

• I knew the rich had it figured out. They just keep getting richer and richer, regardless of the market swings and changes.

• I knew if I was going to find the answer, I was going to have to find out what the rich were doing differently and see if there was a way for me to (on a smaller scale) do what they were doing.

• I knew I was going to have to “make up some lost financial ground” to get my retirement account back to where I wanted it to be. Plus I needed to do it in a way that did not involve big risk. This meant I would have to find a way to safely get much higher returns on my investments and turn my money faster while limiting my downside.

• I knew if I looked long enough and hard enough, I could find the answer… So I kept looking.

To make up the financial ground that I had lost, I knew I was going to have to focus on the velocity of my money. If I kept getting really small annual returns on my money, I knew I would not reach my retirement goals in time, and that wasn’t an option.

It was kind of like being in the third quarter of a football game and being down by 28 points. I couldn’t keep using running plays that would only gain a few yards at a time because that wouldn’t win the game for me. The clock would run out on me if I chose that strategy. I needed to score some points pretty quickly if I wanted a chance to actually win the game before the clock ran out. And, I wanted to find a way to do it safely as well.

Talk about a tall order. I needed to grow my retirement account much faster than I’ve managed to do over the last few decades, and I needed to grow it safer than I had managed to in the past. I didn’t have time to make any more mistakes or face any more setbacks. I needed to get it right.

I knew what I wanted my retirement to look like. And I definitely knew what I DID NOT want my retirement to look like. I just had not yet found a reliable plan to get me there. I knew it had to be out there somewhere. I just needed to find it, and find it pretty darn fast!