So if you’re looking for ways to accelerate your retirement, here’s how you can move the date of your retirement party up a few years:

1. Add cash.
Yes, it takes money to make money. So the first step in starting and growing your retirement nest egg is finding ways to get more cash into your retirement accounts.

When times are tight, saving more can be a tall order. But you may get some help. If your employer offers a matching contribution to your 401(k) plan, you might double those extra savings. Similarly, Uncle Sam offers benefits in the form of deductions for contributions to 401(k) plans and traditional IRAs, as well as tax credits for low- and middle-income taxpayers who contribute to IRAs.

It takes a little more than $550 per month in savings, earning a 7% return, to get to $1 million over the course of a 35-year career. But if you can add just $100 per month to that — including what your employer puts in and your tax savings — you can cut more than two years off your wait.

2. Embrace stocks.
Saving more is great, but there’s only so much you’ll be able to put aside. You have to make the most of what you have.

People are often too conservative in their retirement investments. Despite the sometimes violent ups and downs of the stock market, the long-term return on stocks far exceeds that of less risky investments like bonds and bank savings accounts. If you have all your money in cash, you won’t lose a penny — but you’re lucky to make 1%-2% right now. Even target funds and other balanced retirement options have sizable portions of their assets in bonds.

A 7% return is a reasonable average for a portfolio that has slightly more in bonds than in stocks. But throughout most of your career, you can afford to take more risk. Owning more stock could raise that return to 9%, lopping off almost five more years from your target.

3. Hit for the fences.
If you only want to match the S&P 500, buying index funds is easy. To get higher returns, however, you’ll have to find stocks that will outperform the index. Here are some examples from the past 20 years:

Those stocks have done particularly well, especially given how badly stocks have done since 2000. But you don’t have to belt all your picks out of the park to retire sooner. If you can eke out just another couple of percentage points on your average return — boosting it to 11% — then that’ll cut another 3 1/2 years off your target.

4. Become a cheapskate.
So far, we’ve only looked at half of the story. How much you spend plays just as important a role in retirement as how much you save. And while many expenses go away when you stop working, new ones quickly take their place — things like travel, entertainment, hobbies, and medical care.

But you have a lot of control over many of these expenses. If it’s worth it to you to spend less in retirement, you won’t have to save as much before you retire. Cutting 10% off your spending means you’ll get to your smaller goal a year earlier.

All in all, combining these four simple tips can let you retire as much as a decade or more sooner than you otherwise would. That thought just might be enough to make even a bad day at work seem brighter.

Source: Fool.com

What’s your immediate, knee-jerk reaction? I’m going to guess you think it’s a bad idea.

Even so, thousands upon thousands of Harley-Davidson (NYSE: HOG) owners have done it — it’s one of the oldest and most popular brands-as-permanent-affiliation. And they aren’t alone.

So what’s the difference between the company you thought of and Harley-Davidson? And why should it matter to your investing?

4 ways to get ahead
There are lots of things that make a great company: strong financials, excellent management, well-produced products or services. But however great a company is, it won’t last unless it has some kind of competitive advantage, some way to protect its market share and grab more.

Competitive advantages come in many forms:
••• Economies of scale, which allow bigger companies to offer products for less. Think Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT), which can use its mammoth size to bargain for better rates.
••• Network effects, which make the value of the service increase the more people use it. eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY), for example, is the place to buy and sell oddments because of the sheer number of buyers and sellers who congregate there.
••• Intellectual property, such as patents. Drug companies like Merck (NYSE: MRK), for example, are dependent on drug patent protection to recoup the costs of research and development as well as ensure a steady stream of customers.
••• High switching costs, which make it difficult for customers to trade one company in for another. Microsoft‘s (Nasdaq: MSFT) Windows operating platform, for example, is so ubiquitous and so well-known that it’s unlikely PC users will suddenly switch to Linux.

But not every company can avail itself of these gold-standard competitive advantages. Other than economies of scale, those competitive advantages are largely predicated on industry membership.

Everyday retailers don’t have intellectual property rights, nor are they likely to have network effects or high switching costs. What they do have is brand.

Standing out in the crowd
A brand is the conglomeration of all of those “soft” associations customers have with a company or a product, the totality of the experiential and psychological aspects of their interactions.

Brand may be difficult to measure with any confidence, but it points toward something important: the customer’s attachment to this particular product as opposed to all of the other options he or she could pursue.

Think about Nike (NYSE: NKE) — people pay hundreds of dollars for athletic shoes that get far more wear on the street than they do on the court. Abercrombie & Fitch can sell a T-shirt for $50 simply because it has the Abercrombie logo on it, while an identical shirt minus the logo would fetch a fraction as much.

But brand loyalty on the basis of style fads aren’t sustainable over the long term; remember when Gap was the brand of choice?

The strongest retail brands are the ones that express people’s identities — and continue to do so no matter what happens in their lives. Harley-Davidson clearly has it; if you’re a Hog lover, you aren’t going to accept a Honda.

Are you sure you don’t want that tattoo?
Every company will claim it has a strong brand, but the real test of a brand is how well it holds up through the slings and arrows of an outrageous economy. Many food and household products, for example, have excellent name recognition and substantial customer loyalty, but nearly 60% of Americans are currently forgoing their favorite brands for store brands.

Even in the worst economy since the Great Depression, however, Apple (NYSE: AAPL) has continued to hit it out of the park with the iPhone, based largely on the way its sleek design and continued innovation feed into an identity people want to claim, and it’s up 73% since the turn of the year.

It’s that kind of market performance that demonstrates the importance of a strong brand to a great investment — no matter what the economy.

You may not want to tattoo a company’s logo on your body, but if you can’t imagine trading its products in for those of its competitors, then that’s a company worth investigating further.

Source: Fool.com