I JOINED MY COMPANY’S 401(k) plan at age 25. Now, I’m 51. Over the intervening 26 years, there have been many market cycles, recessions, bull markets, a financial crisis and countless periods of market volatility.
Still, my 401(k) is well on its way to being big enough for a comfortable retirement. How did it get there? A third of the balance came from my contributions, a third from my employer’s matching and profit sharing contributions,

WE’RE FACED WITH a host of thorny retirement issues: Keep Social Security solvent. Make Medicare affordable. Many Americans aren’t saving enough. They want to retire earlier than they can reasonably afford. They’re effectively financially illiterate.
But in the end, you don’t need to worry about all Americans. Instead, what you need to worry about is you. Want a comfortable retirement? Here are my 10 commandments:

If your preretirement lifestyle is set with a view to what you can sustain after you quit the workforce,

IF YOU’RE IN COLLEGE right now, saving for retirement probably isn’t even a blip on your radar screen. Yet this is the time in your life when every dollar squirreled away will reap the most bang. Raising your eyebrows in disbelief at the thought of saving for retirement, while in the midst of struggling to cover tuition? My two children are in college and currently making money from summer internships. Here are the five things I tell them:
1.

YOU MAY BE SAVING and investing for retirement. But what you’re really doing is buying future income. How much income? That brings us to a little number crunching, which I hope will illuminate five key financial ideas.
Let’s start with the numbers. Imagine stocks notch 6% a year, but inflation steals two percentage points of that gain, so you collect an after-inflation annual return of 4%. If you socked away $1,000, what would it be worth in retirement?

YOU WILL RETIRE ONE day—and, if you want to spend your final decades in even moderate comfort, it won’t be cheap. Not too concerned about saving for retirement right now? Here are five uncomfortable realities:
1. You’ll almost certainly live to retirement age. Sure, you could go under a bus before then. But that isn’t something you should bank on: If you’re age 20 today, there’s an 85% chance you will live to 65,

AS I CHILD, I REMEMBER reading a series of “choose your own ending” adventure books. These novels allowed the reader, at different junctures, to choose how they wanted the main character in the book to proceed. I always enjoyed rereading these books, creating a different story each time I progressed through the pages.
At this point in my life, I’m beginning to feel like my eventual retirement is a bit of a “choose your own ending” adventure.

WHO’S YOUR WORST financial enemy? Got a mirror? For millions of American workers, their employee benefits play a significant role in their financial life—and yet this noncash portion of their compensation is often undervalued, overlooked and misused.
I designed and managed employee benefits for nearly 50 years. During those years, I tried every form of communication I could think of to get employees to pay attention to their benefits. I retired with a sense of failure.

A FEW YEARS BACK, I was conducting a retirement planning seminar. At one point, I talked about survivor benefits under our company’s pension plan. As I outlined the benefits, I noticed a strange look on one woman’s face. She was the spouse of an employee.
A few minutes later, I spoke about health benefits, explaining that a surviving spouse was required to pay 100% of the premium. Upon hearing that, the woman took a rolled-up newspaper and began beating her husband about the head.

IS WHAT YOU’RE PAID what you’re really paid? Probably not. The compensation that you don’t see each payday has a tremendous impact on your financial security and your future standard of living—and should affect how much you save and how you invest.
Defined benefit pension plans can be the most valuable form of noncash compensation. Health benefits for active and retired employees are a close second—especially so because they’re tax-free compensation (and hence a huge revenue loss for the federal government).

IN LATE MARCH, I SET out into the backcountry of central Oregon with eight other women, all on snowshoes or cross-country skis. We traversed more than 22 miles in the heart of the Oregon Cascades, breaking trail and staying in huts. The terrain was steep, the visibility was poor, the snow was deep and there was a stiff wind.
What does this have to do with investing? The trek was reminiscent in three ways:
Feeling inferior.

BY ALL ACCOUNTS, I’ve won the game. I know the income my family needs to live our desired lifestyle. I have an inflation-adjusted Navy pension in my future. I have two children and two GI Bills, one for each child. My house is paid off and I’m debt-free. Combine all of this with the 4% rule, and it seems I have enough to produce our desired income for the rest of my life. I have “won the game.”
William Bernstein. 

IT’S PROBABLY NO surprise I gravitated toward a career in the sciences: I love compiling data. My master’s thesis was 150 pages of charts, graphs and tables that summarized two years’ worth of research.
When it comes to my finances, I’m equally compelled to gather data. I do so, in part, to create a set of documents that are more tangible than the pixels that make up the account balances on my computer screen.

TIME VALUE OF MONEY, asset class, diversification, dollar-cost averaging: This is the language of investment professionals. But it isn’t the language of everyday Americans, including those saving for retirement in their employer’s 401(k) plan.
Trust me, I know. During my nearly 30 years overseeing 401(k) plans, including providing financial education to participants, it became clear to me that using such plans as intended wasn’t easy for most people.
For diversification, employees would often invest in several different mutual funds all focused on a similar collection of U.S.

I’VE BEEN EMPLOYED on at least a part-time basis since I was 17 years old. For almost three decades now, I’ve been working fulltime. It’s probably not surprising that, at almost 51 years old, I’ve reached the point where I spend considerable energy contemplating a life beyond work.
The idea of achieving financial independence and retiring early—captured by the acronym FIRE, short for financial independence/retire early—is never far from my thoughts. As a born planner,

LIFE MAY HAVE BEEN nasty, brutish and short at one time, but it sure isn’t today. Thinking ahead to retirement? Forget the famous quote by 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes—and ponder the famous wager suggested by 17th century French philosopher Blaise Pascal.
As Pascal saw it, it’s rational to believe in God. If you believe and it turns out God doesn’t exist, the price is modest: an hour lost from every Sunday morning and a little less immorality.