The Rule of 30

With the cost of buying a home or renting an apartment soaring to previously unseen heights, how can Gen Y even begin to think about saving for retirement? Are your knees knocking? Are you nervously biting your nails? Maybe you don’t need to be.

In The Rule of 30, personal finance expert Frederick Vettese provides a surprising — and hopeful — answer to balancing the costs of living with the costs of saving for retirement. Through conversations between a young couple and their neighbour, a retired actuary, the couple and the reader discover:

• How the future investment climate will differ from the recent past and why it requires a different approach to saving
• The problem with saving a constant percentage of pay
• The Rule of 30 and why it is a more rational and personalized way to save
• Whether investing in real estate is a viable alternative to investing in stocks
• The impact renting versus owning your home has on your retirement savings

The Rule of 30 changes the mindset from saving the same flat percentage of pay to saving when it is most convenient to your situation. In most cases, it means less saving early on while mortgage payments are high and children are costly, and more saving later when our earnings are at their highest and expenses at their lowest.

Saving for retirement is a high priority, but it is not the only priority in life. It is time to dispense with old and often unrealistic myths like “just save 10% of your take-home pay.” The truth is we should save differently throughout our pre-retirement years — and The Rule of 30 is a road map for doing so.

Frederick Vettese is Canada’s most visible actuary. His entire career has been focused on working within Canada’s retirement income system. For 27 years, he was chief actuary of Morneau Shepell, a Canadian HR services firm with 6,000 employees and 24,000 clients. Vettese now spends most of his professional time speaking and writing about retirement issues. He has written over 100 articles and op-eds for the Globe and Mail and the National Post alone. He is the author of the #1 bestseller Retirement Income for Life, published by ECW Press. He lives in Toronto, Ontario.