The following is an excerpt from Rich As A King: How the Wisdom of Chess Can Make You a Grandmaster of Investing. by Douglas Goldstein and Susan Polgar. 

The center of the chessboard consists of four squares. In order to maintain a strong position during a game of chess, make sure you dominate at least two of them.

Stationing pawns in the middle of the board is like keeping your best pitcher warmed up in the bullpen. Everyone can see him primed to strike, and the other side feels the constant threat. Likewise, you exert pressure on your opponent with your poised-to-attack pawns in the midpoint of the board. The pawns often don’t need to move, since their mere presence intimidates the other side. In fact, both the relief pitcher and the pawns may not actually move for most of the game. If needed, though, they could lead a deadly assault.

Likewise, put your retirement planning front and center in your overall financial plan. You’ll build it up, making it ever more powerful, until late in your financial game. At that point, being a solid, core asset, it will make all the difference in your winning the money game.

Get ready for the endgame

When you start a new job, you can rule over your monetary center by establishing a pension plan and/or an Individual Retirement Account (IRA). You shouldn’t need to use them until your endgame (retirement), at which point you will want them to be strong… very strong.

According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, about 40% of couples over the age of seventy-five survive on an income of around $27,000 per year, due to their limited savings. To ensure a more successful retirement than that, set aside monthly savings, perhaps using a mutual fund to diversify your money.

The strength of your savings

Though the specific sum invested may seem rather insignificant compared with the cost of a thirty-year retirement, the strength of savings accumulated with the help of regular deposits and compound interest is astonishing.

Consider how much the investment can grow in the future, like a pawn that plods square by square to get to the other end of the board and then transforms into a queen. If you save $100 per month from your twentieth birthday until you retire at sixty-seven, and if you make 6% a year (excluding taxes and fees), you’ll enter your golden years with an account worth over $300,000.

Won’t you feel like a grandmaster then?

See another excerpt from Rich As A King here.