Make Your Retirement Dollars Count in Any Economy, Says Former Wall Street Executive

CHICAGO, Jan. 13 /PRNewswire/ -- A former Wall Street executive who moved to Indiana to invest his life teaching the next generation has written a book for those who want bankable advice about saving for retirement - minus the jargon, charts and mind-numbing details normally associated with the topic.

James O'Donnell, professor of business and economics at Huntington University, and author of The Shortest Book Ever on Saving for Retirement: How to Make Every Dollar Count in Any Financial Climate, makes salient points page after page, using Twain-esque axioms rather than perfectly weighted prose.

For example, there's his two cents on the future of Social Security: "At some point in the near future counting on Social Security may be like watching for the Easter Bunny. There are better ways to spend one's time. Like planning ahead."

Then there's his take on those "foolproof" systems designed to help you beat the market: "Interviews with portfolio managers may be fascinating. But so, too, are market performance correlations that link investment returns to women's skirt lengths, presidential election cycles, or winners of the Super Bowl ... don't invest your money based on such things."

While the investment strategies outlined in the book are simple enough for anyone to follow (whether your name is Rocky or Rockefeller), O'Donnell himself is anything but a simpleton. He graduated from Ivy League schools and spent much of his adult life working for some of the best money management companies in the world. In one year, he personally developed over $1.5 billion in new business.

A spiritual awakening in his mid 30s ultimately led him to take an 80 percent pay cut to teach in small-town Indiana: "I began to believe in God, and to take God seriously: in other words, as something more than a curse word. And I began to see that whatever I had accomplished so far in life was not just because of me and for me."

Within months of arriving in Huntington, his wife, Lizzie, was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The fight to save Lizzie's life was the subject of O'Donnell's first book, which received front-page coverage in The Wall Street Journal and led to a Pulitzer Prize for the author of The Journal article.

Now, he hopes that his latest book will help readers plan for the future, and not just financially. "My experience tells me that too many people focus far too much of their lives on money issues," O'Donnell says. "Saving enough money for retirement matters, but it isn't what life or retirement is really all about."

He concludes, "The bigger issue I hope readers will find time to address is, 'What kind of person am I becoming?' The difference between retirement becoming the greatest time of your life rather than a bad dream will come from how you choose to invest your life."

For review copies or interviews, contact Janis Backing, publicity manager for Moody Publishers, at 312-329-2108 or [email protected].

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SOURCE Moody Publishers