The-Slight-Edge

38 The Slight Edge
notice your good fortune, slap you on the back and tell you how lucky you are,
the critical Slight Edge choices you made are ancient history. And chances are, at
the time you actually made those choices, nobody noticed but you. And even you
wouldn’t have noticed—unless you understood the Slight Edge.
Invisible results.
The Cost of Waiting
I’m sure you’ve heard about the power of compounding interest before. In
fact, you’ve probably heard about it many times. What makes this time different?
Nothing—unless you act on it.
The single most important thing I can tell you about the Slight Edge is this:
it’s already working, right now, either for you or against you. So don’t wait.
My hope for you—my request for you—is that before you reach the last page
of this book, you will have put in place a Slight Edge financial plan for yourself so
that you are consistently building your equity. Some simple, daily (or weekly, or
monthly) discipline that, over time, will buy your financial freedom.
Easy to do? Surprisingly so. Easy not to do? Tragically so.
To give you a sense of the cost of waiting, look at the following example.
Let’s say you and your best friend are both twenty-four years old; you both
read The Slight Edge and decide you’d like to start putting away $2,000 a year
into an IRA so you’ll retire at age sixty-five with over a million dollars.
Your friend starts doing it now. You wait. You don’t get around to it this year,
or next, or the next ... in fact, you procrastinate for the next six years.
At the beginning of year 7, you ask your friend how his IRA is doing. You
are stunned when he tells you that he’s finished: after investing $2,000 a year for
six years at twelve percent, he’s all set. By the age of sixty-five, the little financial
ball he’s started rolling will have snowballed into over one million dollars—even
if he never puts in another penny!
That’s it, you decide, it’s time for action. You start putting in your $2,000
each year. How many years will it take before you’ve caught up to your friend? In
other words, by what age will you be able to stop investing your annual $2,000,
like he did?
You can’t believe your eyes when you see the answer: you’re going to
have to keep investing that $2,000 every single year until the age of sixty-two!
Your six years of procrastination has cost you thirtythree
years of investing—that’s twenty-seven more
years and $54,000 more invested just to arrive at the
same place!