No Time to Lose
By Paul Brown and Brian Hollander
AMACOM, $24.95
240 pages, ISBN 081440720X

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About a decade ago, author Paul Brown had a eureka moment. Rich people in need of financial advice had access to the best experts—but that can cost $500 an hour, out of the league of most people. So to help people in the middle, people like himself, he and Brian Hollander started DirectAdvice (www.directadvice.com), an Internet financial planning site to deliver an expert's knowledge at very little cost. Now they've captured their advice in the new book No Time to Lose, and with the stock market's recent gyrations, we asked Brown to explain how to make investing decisions a little easier.

Is timing everything?
If you remember one thing, it is this: The cost and timing of your goals should govern all your investment decisions. The reason is simple: The best way to balance the two types of risks you face—that inflation will erode the value of your investments, and that there will be a big drop in the market right before you need your money—is to create the right mix of assets for each of your goals today, and then adjust that mix as the time to pay for goals grows nearer.

What's the best long-term strategy?
The further away your goal is the more risks you can afford to take. If your retirement is more than 10 years off, you can afford the volatility that comes from being in stocks. As you probably know, over time stocks have out-performed every investment there is—from real estate and bonds to gold and Mickey Mantle rookie cards. But as we have seen within the last couple of years, the types of returns that stocks produce on average—about 10% to 11% every year since 1926—come with substantial risk. If you planned to send your daughter to college in September and you had all the tuition money in stocks, you'd now be facing a problem.

And for short-term investments?
The closer the goal, the more conservative you want to be. Tuition money for next year for example should already be in something like a certificate of deposit or money market fund.

How do you keep the right mix?
This approach to investing means changing your asset allocation over time. But it's not that hard to do. Our book, No Time to Lose, explains this in detail, and we've even included a free subscription to our on-line service with the purchase of the book.