I’m not sure when I learned about the Rule of 72, but it seems decades ago. It’s ingrained now. I also have “Ten years to double” in my head, which is derived from the Rule of 72. The purpose of this post is to explain

I’ve shown this graph in prior posts (download full view here), but the purpose of this post is to look at this graph in more detail and to better understand the implications for our financial retirement plan. 

This is the plot of cumulative

I always like to think of future financial returns in terms of inflation-adjusted dollars, generally called constant dollars. These are dollars stated in the same purchasing or spending power of some base year. Current dollars are the nominal count of the pieces of paper

My Investing Cost (my net cost reduction from market returns I assume in my financial retirement plan; and it’s really for Patti and me) has just dropped about 30%. Wowee. I thought it was as low as it could get, but I was wrong. We