The task of funding retirement is a huge one and the first thing to accept is that you will have to know what you are doing if you want to have a chance of succeeding. Just like in any other skilled area there are specialist knowledge and skills that need to be learned, practiced and applied in order to succeed.

The education that you will need to acquire can be broken down into four categories that should be acquired in the order that I will discuss them.

The First Category is Success Education

You can't expect to succeed financially until you have learned the principles and practices of general success. Financial success is simply a subset of these general principles and will easily follow on once you have mastered the three areas of success.

The first area of your success education is Success Thinking.

Every success starts with a thought and research has shown that people who are consistently successful have a different way of thinking about life than the people who aren't consistently successful. This being the case it makes sense to acquire the thinking habits that those successful people have.

The second part of success education is a knowledge and mastery of the Laws of Success.

Just like the physical universe functions under physical laws such as the law of gravity, the universe of human results functions under its own set of laws. If you learn what these laws are and how to apply them then you can work with the laws and success becomes an automatic result. However if you are ignorant of, or you ignore, these laws then you will never achieve lasting success.

The third part of success education is a knowledge and application of Success Habits.

Your habits are the means by which your subconscious mind keeps you on target for what it considers to be your normal start of existence. This so called normal state is not necessarily the state to which you aspire. In fact if you are not well on the way to being rich then you will need to change what your subconscious considers to be normal for you.

There are certain success habits that all successful people have and if you learn and practice these habits you can use them to reprogram your subconscious mind for success.

Wealth Creation Education

Once you have mastered the basics of success then you can turn your attention to the specifics of wealth education.

The first part of wealth education is to learn how money really works.

Once you know and understand how money really works then you will begin accumulating wealth. If you are not currently accumulating wealth then this is probably an indication that you, like most of the population, have considerable misunderstanding of how money works and how to harness its power for your own benefit.

The second part of wealth education is to learn how income works.

Once you understand how income really works then you will be able to leverage your own income so that you greatly increase the capital that you have to invest.

That brings us to the third phase of your wealth education; how investment works.

There are many different kinds of investment each with their strengths and weaknesses and each with their own degree of required involvement and required knowledge and skills.

As well as a huge range of investment vehicles there is also a huge range of investment strategies. The good news is that there is a vehicle and strategy that is most suited to taking you from where you are today to where you want to be. However in order to find it you need to gain some general education on how investments really work.

I have outlined for you the six different areas of education that you need to acquire and apply in order to become wealthy. It is not going to happens overnight and it will require some dedication on your part. But if you are willing to apply that dedication then you can achieve wealth, regardless of where you are starting from.

Wealth is not a matter of luck, it is the result of becoming the person your need to be, learning the knowledge and skills you need to have and then applying them with consistency and dedication.

It is now up to you to start the ball rolling. I firmly believe that the best place to start is by reading my book on success and diligently completing each of the exercises contained in that book. A link to the web site for this book is printed below this article.