Jane Bryant Quinn and Dave Barry on Retirement

Filed in archive Retirement on January 25, 2006

We have been talking a lot lately about pensions and the 401(k) concerning whether one is superior to another. My take has been that there is not a great risk in transferring from the pension to the 401(k).

In a recent hilarious article written by Bill Virgin of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, he gives some great thoughts using Jane Bryant Quinn and Dave Barry as ways of making sense out of being successful with your personal finances.

He reports:

"...in one of those rare, near-magical alignments of the literary planets, we have in recent weeks received not one, but two books in the genre that are informative, readable, Entertaining - and reasonably short, too - from two of the era's top writers on the subject."

One is Jane Bryant Quinn. The other is Dave Barry. Barry wrote "Dave Barry's Money $ecrets" and Quinn "Smart and Simple Financial Strategies for Busy People."

Most of you will remember Quinn as a nationally syndicated columnist who writes with the readers' interests in mind. She is obviously the one who has the ability to produce a personal-finance book that would be worth reading.

Here are a couple of gems from Quinn's book:

"Investing should be about as thrilling as watching paint dry," she writes. "It's the background of your life, not life itself."

"And investing needn't be complex or time-consuming to be successful," she adds.

"Only a few things work, and they work really well. If you set up a system that runs automatically, you can't fail. Success comes from starting right, then keeping your itchy fingers off."

This says everything about the success of investing that we need to know. The real difference between success with a pension and a 401(k) is not the risk factor, it's the "keeping your itchy fingers off," factor. Do that and you will be successful in the financial goals you have set for your life.

Next time we'll look at the contrasts that Barry and Quinn talk about in their books.