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How can you tell if you’re on the right track financially? Photo: Dennis Moynihan

One nugget of personal finance information that I’ve seen repeated over and over is the notion that if you have a year’s salary saved for retirement at age 35, you’re on pace to retire very nicely at age 65. It actually turns out that the statement is more or less true, if you assume, of course, that you continue saving at that same rate for the next thirty years, your career doesn’t take any major twists or turns, and the American economy stays relatively strong.

Would you know if someone opened a credit card in your six-year-old’s name? Photo: allthecolor/reynermedia

Legendary bank robber Willie Sutton is often quoted as saying he robbed banks because that’s where they keep the money.

Modern criminals in search of easy cash are more likely to use other means to separate you from your money. In 2011, for example, bank robbers took about $38 million from U.S. banks. That same year, identity thieves took more than $8 billion from consumers, and the numbers go up from there: $13.2 billion in 2012, and $21 billion by 2013.

More than any other factor, the rate at which you put money away will impact your investing results.

If you’re new to investing, it’s pretty easy to feel overwhelmed. There are strange words to figure out, complicated ideas to understand, new decisions to make, and plenty of conflicting advice about all of it.

It’s almost enough to make you want to avoid the topic altogether.

But here’s the truth: It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in finance to be a good investor. In fact, the most important investment decisions you have to make are actually pretty simple.

So here are the five most important factors for your investment success. I promise that none of them will make your head spin.

1. Your Savings Rate

The amount you save is far and away the most important factor as you start investing. Nothing else comes close.

Sometimes I have the privilege of talking to a reporter or a radio host or a television personality regarding some particular personal finance story they’re working on. Most of the time, the story they’re doing is a good one, focusing on how people are choosing to be more careful with their money or how people are making different career choices in order to bring to the forefront other values in their life.

I’m thrilled that the word is getting out there about such things. You don’t have to be a slave to your work. You can center your life around other things – and, believe it or not, it often frees you to perform even better professionally when you do.

Yet, whenever I spend time talking to a journalist, I usually hear one question that really gets me frustrated. It’s some variation on this question:

What is it like to give up all of the stuff that’s fun about life?