Stefan Sagmeister recommends a powerfully different way of thinking about retirement. For most people, retirement looks like this:

Grow up and learn for 25 years, work for 45 years and at the end take 15 years of retirement.

Sagmeister arranges his life differently:

Instead of taking the 15 years of retirement at the end, he chops off 5 retirement years and intersperses them throughout his working life.

Impractical, you say? What if you saved enough money to cover all your expenses for a year in advance?. Would you do it then?

The mini-retirement is a powerful idea, and one that I’m trying at the moment. As I type this I’m in the middle of a mini-retirement in Hawaii, taking time off from my career and planning the next move in my life.

It’s one of the best decisions I’ve made. But more to come on that in a future blog post.

For now, watch this TED talk and think about a mini-retirement for your own life. What would you do with it?

The world recently crossed a demographic threshold: as of mid 2008 more than 50% of the world’s population lives in cities. Despite the Malthusian predictions of the 70s, the population of industrialized nations is decreasing — and the cities are the cause. Cities act as population sinkholes for one simple reason: babies are expensive.

In the city potential parents have a choice to make: would you rather have a child or a million dollars— And the time to enjoy it? While babies are an asset in rural areas, they are an enormous liability in the cities.

When my wife and I started to plan our long-term financial goals, we calculated the earliest possible retirement age if we really focused and lived like spartans. Crunching the numbers we came up with a low boundary of 45 years old. Pretty good, we thought.

My wife, beautiful intelligent woman that she is, looked at the amount necessary to save annually and said to me: “This spreadsheet is the best reason I’ve ever seen not to have a baby.”

The remark about babies costing a million dollars isn’t far off. According to a study done in the 1990s by the US government raising a child from 0 to 18 costs between $170,000 and $250,000. Just one! That’s excluding sending the precious darling to college. And that’s data from nearly two decades ago.

While there may be good reasons to have a baby, your finances are not one of them. So, before you and the little lady decide she no longer needs to take that little pill every night, ask yourself: a child or a million dollars?

The Motley Fool has an interesting article on how, if you are in your 20s, you can save 20,000 USD and through the magic of compound interest turn it into 1,000,000 USD by the time you retire.

[Click here to read The One-Year $1 Million Challenge]

The Automatic Millionaire by Dave Bach is a little book with one big idea: you are too lazy to budget. Instead of planning a budget, you should automatically deduct savings and retirement from your paycheck. According to The Automatic Millionaire, this is the most fool-proof way to build wealth, and you’ll live off of the remaining money more easily than you imagine.

The Automatic Millionaire is the book that brought the world ‘The Latte Factor’ — the idea that small, daily costs drain your money like leaches. To those unfamiliar with compound interest, the Latte Factor is shocking. Forgoing a $4 cup of coffee daily and instead investing the money, yields $263,000 after thirty years. Bach has a Latte Factor Calculator on his website where you can adjust the numbers to your situation.

Bach does a good job of stressing the importance of setting your financial system on autopilot in order to remove what is always the weakest and least reliable link in executing a plan: you. Internalizing this idea can mean the difference between retiring comfortably and working until you die.

While I liked the book, the style has a quality of breathless excitement that annoyed me. Rather than just tell the reader his ideas, Bach has a quasi-fictional couple from whom the author learned all his secrets relay their story instead. This wouldn’t be a problem except that Bach has a tin ear for the rhythm of a conversation.

Perhaps this is the teacher side of me flaring with anger, but the author repulsed me when he claimed not to be a ‘math whiz’. Sure, not everyone is Ramanujan but if you’re writing about finances, I expect better of you than to dismiss math skills with the rest of the hoi polloi

To increase the book from its natural, pamphlet size, Bach included lots of needless filler. Bizarrely this includes multipage lists of websites and their descriptions. One such list covered practically the entire international banking industry naming each company with a paragraph of services available online.

Still, the book is relatively short for the genre and can be easily read in an afternoon. One very nice feature is that Bach motivates the reader to take action immediately. Each chapter finishes with a clear and actionable checklist of things to do to set up your finances in accordance with the system.

Click here to buy a copy of The Automatic Millionaire

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Header photograph by OiMax