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How to Make Your Money Last: The Indispensable Retirement Guide, by Jane Bryant Quinn
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About the Author
Jane Bryant Quinn is a leading commentator on personal finance. She is author of the bestselling Making the Most of Your Money NOW, Smart and Simple Financial Strategies for Busy People, and Everyone's Money Book. Quinn has written for Newsweek, The Washington Post, Bloomberg.com, Woman’s Day, and Good Housekeeping. An Emmy Award winner, Quinn has appeared on PBS and CBS News. Her personal finance column currently appears in the AARP Bulletin. She lives in New York City and blogs at JaneBryantQuinn.com.
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
How to Make Your Money Last 1 The Joy and Challenge of Life After Work Now that you can do whatever you want, what do you want to do? Retirement challenges us like nothing else. We have to reinvent our lives. One day we’re part of the vast American workforce—living by the clock, attacking new projects, and focusing our minds and skills. The next day we can sleep until noon if it pleases us. Then we bound out of bed, free at last, ready for coffee and lunch and . . . what? Successful retirement—whenever it occurs—turns out to be work of another kind. The future is almost as blank a slate as it was when you were 18 and wondering what was going to happen to you. Fifty years later, you’re fortified with knowledge and experience but with no place to take it. You might have a partner in life, children, grandchildren, status in your community, and a dog that loves you. Still, you have seven days a week and 52 weeks a year to fill. No sane human being can watch that much television or play that much golf. Maybe you’ll be able to stay at work well past normal retirement age. Even so, you might shorten your hours. The last day of work can’t be held off forever. You need an action plan to transition into this new phase of your life. You also need a financial plan to make the most of the income and savings that you have available. That’s what most of this book is about. “Money can’t buy happiness,” they say, but it sure can buy food, shelter, heat, phone service, streaming movies on TV, and gas for the car. A little extra buys plane tickets, ball games, concerts, and long-term peace of mind. It’s hard to be happy if you’re always worried about the bills. Learning how to stretch your available income and rightsize your life are the first steps toward retiring well. Even if retirement seems far away, steps you take now—to save and invest—can greatly improve your standard of living when your paycheck eventually stops. But before I talk money, I’d like to talk about the nonfinancial challenges of life after full-time work. They’re huge and, for most people, unexpected. We fling ourselves into leisure as if a grand vacation lay ahead. But permanent vacations can get pretty boring. When we were working, we had a sense of accomplishment and a place in the world, even if—at the end—we couldn’t wait to quit. Now, having shut that door, we need another place. What are we retiring to? Eventually, when you look back on your transition from work to retirement, you’ll think of it as perhaps the most creative period of your life. Most of us still need an active sense of social worth. But instead of getting it from a workplace, ready-made, we have to make it ourselves. The challenge is to discover new interests, new places, and new friends. Your weeks should fill up again with projects, meetings, entertainments, and events—activities you chose yourself, to gladden your days and give purpose to your life. You’ll probably take on these projects at a leisurely pace. I’m not suggesting that you’ll want to be busy all the time. But neither will you want to look at a daily calendar that’s blank. It takes time to move from the worker role to the role of engaged, individual citizen. How long the transition takes will depend on your personal initiative and will. The faster you can bury the old “workplace you” and rise to a new “liberated you,” the more content you’re going to be. Not everyone moves into retirement willingly. You might lose your job and spend some unhappy weeks or months rehashing that stressful time. Your health (or your spouse’s health) might be dicey, which, for now, completely occupies your mind. The departure from work might have been so sudden that you had no time to prepare emotionally. Widows, widowers, and the divorced face similar problems. They’ve been forcibly “retired” from married life and now face their own blank slate. No matter how you get there, you (and your partner, if you have one) will have to figure out how to build another life. The questions will be the same for everyone. Who are you, anyway? For so much of our lives, we identify ourselves with our jobs. “I’m a lawyer.” “I’m a teacher.” “I’m an operations manager.” “I work for IBM.” Those who have young children might also say “I’m a mother” or “I’m a father.” Our jobs and family responsibilities give us status and meaning. When we quit, or the children grow up, there’s an instant loss of status that few of us are truly prepared for. We’re in a new role—that of citizen-retiree. It’s an empty vessel until we fill it up. What are you going to do with the rest of your life? A 3G retirement (golf, gossip, and grandchildren) isn’t always enough, cute as the grandchildren are. Most retirees today are vigorous, mentally alert, and eager to jump into something active and interesting. We have skills, smarts, and dreams. At work, we were accomplishing stuff, even if we got tired of it. As parents, we had the critical job of raising responsible adults. But what are we accomplishing now? Loss of meaning and purpose throws some retirees into depression, even those who thought they couldn’t wait to start a leisured life. If you spend your hours in front of a TV set, you’re likely to—quite literally—bore yourself to death. You’ll need all your imagination and energy to discover a new role. Where will you find friends? When you worked, you made social contact simply by doing your job every day. You had people to chat with or complain about, customers to call on, and lunches with colleagues. When your job ends, however, your workaday friends are likely to fall away. You need to get out of the house and do things, not just for fun and intellectual interest but for the social companionship, too. Women are better at this than men but it can be a challenge for both. THE FIVE STAGES OF RETIREMENT The gerontology researcher Robert Atchley studied the transition from working life to leisure. Retirement, he says, is a process, not an event. Some people hustle through the stages. Others take months, even years, to reach serenity. The better you manage the first stage, the faster your progress is likely to be. Stage 1: Preretirement. You gradually disengage from work. You’re still doing your job but your imagination moves ahead. You talk with friends about their own plans for life after work and ask retired friends what they’re up to now. You put together a budget to see if, and when, you can afford to leave your paycheck behind. If you’re married, you have many talks with your spouse about how you each expect retirement to work—your hopes and fears, where you’ll live, what you’ll do with your time, whether you’ll both retire at the same time and, if not, what the expectations will be. You think about what you might do next. If you hope for part-time work, now’s the time to start making the contacts. There might be a project you can do for your current employer or others in your business. If you’re being laid off, do your best to think about your next life, not your past one. You’re not “unemployed” (bad place), you’re “semiretired” (better place). Forward is your only choice. Stage 2: The Honeymoon. You’re free! No more deadlines or office stress. You’ll do some of the things you’ve been meaning to get to—clean the closets, paint the porch, take a trip. If you already have a lot of interests, you might step up your engagement with them. If you’ve led a high-pressure work life, you might simply rest with your feet up, read, go fishing, take walks, or watch ball games. Assuming that your retirement was planned, you’re happy, happy, happy with your decision. Your honeymoon can last for many months, provided that you’re moving quickly toward your other interests. But it might last only a week or two if you have nothing to do and nowhere to go. Stage 3: Disenchantment. Gradually, your days come to seem a little bit empty. You feel a loss of status, if you identified strongly with your job. To the younger, working world, you’re obsolete. Even if you retired gladly, your new activities might not be as fulfilling as you’d hoped. You see fewer people and feel more isolated, especially if your spouse or partner is still working. You might notice that money is going out the door faster than you planned. If you retired specifically to do something else, such as starting a business or taking up teaching, you might skip Stage 3 or pass through it pretty quickly. Ditto if you’re an outgoing person who loves discovering new things. If not, disenchantment might catch you by surprise and slow down your adjustment. You’re not so eager to get out of bed and can’t figure out how to spend your afternoons. You join a club or half try to volunteer for a local organization but it doesn’t work out. If your health is poor you might come to feel that your life is effectively over. You’re just taking up space. For some, Stage 3 might last a year or more while you obsess over what you “used to be.” Stage 4: Reorientation. It dawns on you how bored (and boring) you’ve become. Emotionally, you’re finally ready to advance. Some retirees will go back to work. For the rest, it’s like retiring all over again but with a more realistic eye. You take stock of your income and expenses and rightsize your life financially. You evaluate your experiments with activities so far and start to engage more deeply with the one that interests you the most. One is all you need; others will come along. Your lingering work-life persona is finally being put to bed. You feel yourself growing into your new role. Stage 5: Stability. You’ve got it together. You’re finding new purpose and feeling productive again. You’re happy (or at least satisfied) with your life and are living within your means. Along with new interests, you’ve discovered ordinary pleasures, such as browsing in a library or taking walks. Some retirees get to this stage pretty quickly—in fact, directly from the honeymoon. Others take years. You’ll know you’ve arrived when all your thoughts are forward-looking and your days are full. MAKE YOUR PLAN: IT’S LIBERATING! The transition from work to “freedom” is harder than most of us realize until we get there. It starts with clearing the old stuff out of your head—your work, routines, and expectations of status. They get in the way of your life ahead. Post work, you can do anything that’s within your budget and physical capabilities. When your calendar is blank and you’re wondering how to fill it, it seems natural to start a list. You might begin by asking yourself what makes you happy—not only today but what made you happy in the past. It might be something you haven’t done for 30 years. Never mind. Write it down. You’re trying to capture anything—specific activities, experiences, relationships—that once put a smile on your face. From there, branch out to everything you’ve ever thought of doing. No idea is trivial. Maybe you’d like to improve your tennis or golf. Read all of Charles Dickens. Research your family’s roots. Get a puppy and train it. Learn woodworking. Take cooking classes. Take dance classes. Join a singing group (or start one). Join a weight-loss group or exercise class. Learn photography, including the art of editing photos digitally. Teach Sunday school. Take music lessons, maybe on an instrument you used to play before you got so busy. Join a bridge group. Join a chess club. Give parties. Learn another language. Walk a long mountain trail. Learn local history. Run for local office or join a political campaign team. Start a website to share your professional expertise. Join an investment club. Get more involved with your church or temple. Start a local newsletter. Coach sandlot baseball. Make pots. Paint (President George W. Bush started painting lessons when he left office). Volunteer for a worthy cause. Start (or join) a protest group. Tie flies for people who fish. Create gardens for yourself and your friends. Become a local tour guide or docent in a regional museum. Make beautiful holiday and birthday cards. Learn computer skills. Sign up for Skype so you can talk to your children and grandchildren long distance, free. Run a charity fund drive. Make jewelry. Become a discount coupon maven. Join a yoga class. Sort the family photos and put them online. Attend local concerts and lectures. Write your autobiography. Have regular dinners with friends. Spend quality time with your spouse or children. Join AmeriCorps, for civic opportunities. Teach English as a second language. Start a wine-tasting group. Try out for a local amateur theater production or offer to paint scenery. Find a bird-watching pal. Travel—be it cruises, visits to children, group tours, or day trips to interesting places near your home. Restore furniture or an old car. Manage garage sales for neighbors. Etcetera, etcetera, and so forth, as the king of Siam would say. You might enjoy going back to school. Some retirees work toward college or advanced degrees, others audit courses. A school near you might offer extension courses to adults (check Road Scholar’s Lifetime Learning Institute for opportunities). Free or low-fee college courses are available online: Scroll through the offerings at edX.org, Coursera.org, Udemy.com, and Udacity.com as well as the online courses from Harvard, Dartmouth, Yale, Duke, the University of California, Berkeley, and others (for a long list of what is available, go to MOOC-list.com). Some courses are live; they require you to be at your computer at certain hours and to complete assignments (although not necessarily submit to tests). Others let you listen to lectures whenever you want. Finally, make a list of your skills. Are you good with your hands or with computers? Do you know finance? Can you organize groups? Create marketing campaigns? Work well with children? You have a lot to offer your community that it can use. A focus on skills can help direct you to volunteer groups that would be thrilled to have you. Business people might join a local SCORE (Service Corps of Retired Executives), an organization that helps small businesses get started or expand. Financial people might assist a nonprofit with its books, investments, and fund drives, or study to be a financial planner with an emphasis on retirement prep. Those who drive a mean hammer might volunteer with a local Habitat for Humanity. If you’re good with people, you might become a health or social service aide. A skills list helps you assess job prospects, too. You might not find your next life’s work immediately—a delay that risks dumping you, grumpily, into the depressive Stage 3. But keep trying things out. One of them will click. To get yourself moving, set up an engagement calendar—one of those month-at-a-glance hanging calendars or the calendar on your computer. Put something useful or interesting into your schedule every day. It might be work around the house (clean the closets, repair the screens), ordinary errands (shopping, doctor’s appointments), community activities (club meetings, volunteer days), hobbies (consult your “makes me happy” list), or personal enrichment (reading, study). You might undertake weekly mini-explorations of nearby towns—to visit a new park, a small museum, a used-book store. It takes as little as one activity, plus normal chores, to structure your day. Something you have to do (or want to do) gets you up in the morning. Regular activities also have the virtue of bringing you new friends as well as renewing relationships with friends who weren’t also business colleagues. As often as possible, your calendar should include things you do with other people rather than things you do alone. If you like playing Scrabble or backgammon find a challenging partner rather than spend hours playing anonymously online. If you like to walk, find a walking partner. Cooks might find a cooking partner. Have I mentioned exercise? One of the best things you can do for yourself is to join a gym, even if (like me) you’ve resisted exercise all your life. Vigorous exercise greatly improves your general health, appearance, and well-being. It holds down doctor bills, takes off pounds, and keeps your joints and muscles moving. Studies show that if you lower your blood pressure and reduce “bad” cholesterol, you’re less likely to suffer dementia in older age. Exercise classes are also great opportunities for socializing. Instead of grumbling about the office you can grumble about your abs. If you’re not yet online, a world awaits you. From your laptop or iPad, you can follow the news, communicate with family and friends, plan a trip, take a free online college course, research any subject that interests you, find answers to medical questions, follow your investments, shop, get book recommendations, nail the bargain plane tickets sold to people who can travel at the last moment, and find a vacation condo to rent for a month. For travel with a purpose, check the opportunities at RoadScholar.org (formerly Elderhostel). An Internet search for “senior travel” turns up organizations such as Senior Cycling and ElderTreks. These and similar groups offer adventurous trips in the United States and abroad—always with a good mattress and bathroom at the end of the day. We’re past the age of going “scout.” THE WORLD OF THE SEMIRETIRED For some, volunteering and leisure time interests aren’t nearly enough. You spent your life working and miss the buzz. Doing part-time work or starting a home business is a terrific transition from full-time work to, eventually, full-time leisure. It’s also the answer for people who need income to tide themselves over to their Social Security checks. Some companies hire their own retirees for consulting or project work but don’t limit yourself to the sort of thing you did before. People, organizational, or management skills are transferable to many types of businesses. You could be a tour director or take seasonal work at a national park. The health professions are looking for recruits, especially people interested in working with the elderly. Local vocational schools offer short-term training for a wide variety of jobs. Online hiring halls such as Craigslist.com and SeniorJobBank.org list opportunities nearby. If you’re unfamiliar with the Web and social media, take a course. Employers nowadays expect to receive job applications by email. If they’re interested, they’ll turn to the Web to learn more about you. Older professionals and business people, in particular, should post their resumes and personal profiles on LinkedIn.com. The managers who do the hiring—almost certainly younger than you—will check LinkedIn just to see if you understand modern communications. If you’re not on the Web you’re invisible. You might even start your own business. I can’t find good numbers on how many retirees do so but a 2009 “recareering” study done by the Urban Institute for AARP gives you a hint. Of people in midlife who retired from their previous jobs and changed careers, about 31 percent say they went from working for other people to working for themselves. Finding the right business idea takes time. Again, turn to lists. Write down lots of ideas, no matter how far-out they seem. Test them against your interests, abilities, and professional or social contacts, then winnow them down. A high percentage of retirement businesses take advantage of knowledge and connections that the retiree already has. Many good books have been written about starting and running a small business. You might find a course for entrepreneurs at your local community college or the business school at a nearby university. There you’ll learn not only from the teachers but from other business owners who are taking classes, too. Legal, sales tax, bookkeeping, and similar unfamiliar issues become manageable when you talk with people who have solved them. One warning before you launch: Have a plan B. What will you do if the business doesn’t work? You can probably afford to lose a small investment but don’t endanger your home or wipe out your retirement savings. Always look ahead to what you’ll be doing for the rest of your life. RETIREMENT FOR TWO Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk to each other. That’s what every financial planner tells me that couples need to do when retirement first springs to mind. Single people need to think only about themselves when making plans. Couples, however, are making a dual decision. Are you both ready for retirement? If so, what next? If you both work and one of you isn’t ready to quit, how will you handle the relationship? How will a homemaker feel when his or her partner is suddenly home all day? Spouses or partners often assume that they both see retirement the same way and that’s not necessarily so. When they start talking they might be surprised—pleasantly or otherwise—by what the other thinks. For example, a husband might expect his working wife to retire when he does, when in fact she’s perfectly happy with her job. A wife at home might think her husband should work a few more years so they can accumulate more savings. Each spouse might have a different dream about where and how to live. One partner might have secretly run up debt that now has to be confessed. These can be rough conversations if your differences are large. Somehow you need to get to the same page. The quality of your retirement will depend not only on finding new things to do but on developing new ways of living with each other. Retirement gets simpler when both members of a working couple quit at the same time. You can travel when you want, make daytime social plans, share household chores and projects, or move somewhere else. A vibrant retirement life means keeping each other excited about what’s happening every day. If only one of you retires, however, you need to develop some ground rules. For example, the spouse or partner at home will typically take on more household chores. (When my late husband retired, our son took him into the laundry room and said, “Dad, this is a washing machine.”) In return, the spouse at work should try to find more evening and weekend time for things you can do together. Most importantly, the spouse at home shouldn’t pressure the working spouse to quit. If you pout long and hard enough, you might get your way but your spouse won’t be a happy partner down the road. Why should a wife give up her work to husband-sit (or vice versa)? As the retired spouse, you should make your own schedule, find your own friends, get your own life, even take your own trips. Eventually, your partner will be ready for leisure, too. A full-time homemaker is in a different position. She (it’s usually a she) has reinvented her life since the day she “retired” as an all-day parent. She might have gone to work full- or part-time or deeply involved herself as a volunteer. Her days have structure—shopping, cleaning, friends, hobbies, meetings, exercise, walking the dog. The last thing she needs is a crabby husband demanding to be entertained or ordering her around the way he ordered subordinates at work. On the other hand, she can’t pretend that he isn’t there. Talk, talk, talk about it. You’re entering this new life together. A husband’s free time, shared with his homemaker wife, can help her get out of a rut as well as set new directions for himself. Not everyone can expect a bouncing, lively retirement life. Your health, or your spouse’s or partner’s health, might be poor. But even folks with limitations find positive ways to spend their time—connecting with friends, playing cards, learning things on the Internet, taking short day trips. Whatever your situation, happiness lies in letting go of the past. All that matters now is who you are in the moment. Retirement is an adventure, demanding all of your creativity and force. So keep experimenting. No one but you can invent your new life.
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Product details
Paperback: 384 pages
Publisher: Simon & Schuster; Reprint edition (January 10, 2017)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1476743770
ISBN-13: 978-1476743776
Product Dimensions:
5.5 x 0.8 x 8.4 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.7 out of 5 stars
372 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#6,489 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
This is one of a new group of books for people about to retire or newly retired, as opposed to all the "save for retirement someday books" which, if read carefully will convince you it's mathematically impossible to retire unless you're dead (and thrifty.)The premise here is that you've had enough fun working and if need be, you'll downsize in order to leave all that workplace joy behind and actually enjoy what remains of your life. A lot of the information here is stuff you should already know but what I really like about JBQ's books is that she touches on the bigger picture, the non-financial stuff as well.So yeah, take advantage of that 401k match and buy low fee index funds. Try not to pull Social Security until age 70. But also...what will you do to stay busy? How important is staying in your house? Do you have a network of friends? Is taking part time work out of the question? How's your health? How concerned are you about leaving money to children (or your spouse?)As with most Americans, I don't have enough to retire. But this book left me feeling that if I'm careful and lucky, I just might pull it off.
I had difficulty choosing how many stars to rate this book. It has pros and cons. I think it's excellent for people who have little to no experience with financial planning. One clue about this is she addresses people who are afraid to buy stocks when prices are down. Any half savvy investor would know that is the time to buy; when stocks are "on sale". Would you be afraid to buy clothes when they are on sale and wait for the prices to go back up? Same thing. Anyway, I wanted to give it 2.5 stars because it lacked what I was looking for, and her stance against individual stocks is way too strong. But maybe my expectations were too high. Her compilation and explanation of ideas and theories for newbie financial planners might garner a 4 star rating. So I guess I'll settle for 3 stars. But if I could, I'd do 3.5 stars.I like that she focuses on low fee index funds and warns people about managed funds. Most manage funds (by far) fail to match or beat an index fund, and there is no way to guess which few might beat it. They don't beat them ongoing. Usually just one lucky year, and then the next year it's another lucky fund. So you would have to be a psychic to win with managed funds. But I don't agree with her absolute admonition not to buy any individual stocks.There isn't much in it for people who are already familiar with their finances. I was hoping for some different ideas about retirement fund withdrawals to make it last a lifetime. I didn't see much of that at all. So it didn't live up to my expectations.But for newbie investors it has a lot of good advice.That being said, here are some specific thoughts I have about the book.Her typical 4% withdrawal rule for using ones retirement savings seems very flawed to me. I suppose if you want to leave a pile of money on the table when you die to leave to your kids or something, that rate of withdrawal would work, if you can live on that amount. But if you need more than 4% of your savings to live on, I think it's pretty easy to take significantly more than that, if you are okay with dying broke. For instance, it is not at all difficult to get a return on investment of 6-10%. If you only spend your ROI your principle will never go down. So if you want to draw down some of your principle, you can even withdraw more than the ROI! Example from my personal experience: I invest in dividend stocks. My average dividend yield is 5.5%. So already, without touching any of my principle, I'm better off than the 4% rule. Using an online calculator, I found I can withdraw 7-8% which will use my dividends plus some principle, and I can live to 100 years old and die broke. That's DOUBLE the monthly income than the 4% rule!On page 197 she says that "many retirees wouldn't dream of holding 50% of their savings in stocks". I believe that the idea of moving investments from stocks to bonds as one gets to retirement age is an old, outdated idea. At retirement age you are still a long term investor – 30 years or more. I have about 90% in stocks. Yes, you read that correctly. Individual high yield dividend stocks, well diversified into a couple dozen stocks. This is safer than the old wisdom would make you believe. No matter what happens to the stock prices, I'm getting 5.5% dividends. So I can easily make it through a tough stock market downturn since I don't have to rely on the stock price. I did that in 2007-2008. That “crash†didn’t bother me in the least. I hardly noticed. And on the rare occasion when dividends are reduced, I'm diversified enough such that it would only occur on a very small percentage of my stocks, so it wouldn't affect my average yield very much.On page 223 she says that interest and dividend income won't be enough to live on, and that they won't grow with inflation. Not true. You just need to buy a diversified lot of higher dividend stocks that have a long history of paying and raising dividends every year. I get a raise in my dividend income every year from these stocks. Including the raises, I'm approaching a 6% yield and thus can spend that much without touching the principle.I also disagree with her warning on page 223 about dividend stocks. There is enough diversification to be had. And the dividend stocks in companies that have a long history of not lowering their dividends makes it safe that your dividends won't be lowered. In the banking crash of 2008 I had a couple dozen stocks and two of them lowered dividends. That ratio hardly affected my overall dividend income at all. Also, so what if the banking stocks crashed? That's a good time to buy more when they are "on sale". Look what happened rather quickly afterwards; they soared! When stocks go down, avoid the tendency to want to sell and get out. Buy more! Anyone with stock buying experience knows this.I agree about her assessment of most financial planners. If they are on commission, you can't trust them to have your interest, instead of theirs, at heart. Of course there are exceptions to every rule, but how are you supposed to know which are the extremely few good ones? The best way is to simply avoid them. Use fee-only ONLY!It also surprises me that she never discuss early retirement when calculating social security. These calculations are always based on the assumption that you will continue to earn the same amount until retirement age. Thus if you retire early, the years between then and social security age will have no income and thus will not add to your social security benefit. In this case, you need to figure out the 35 highest earning years of your life and use that to estimate your benefits instead of relying on the government’s estimate.Another thing she doesn't mention is the Republican threat. They are always trying to take our social security and Medicare away. I think there are too many old people dependent on these safety nets that will make this a hard task for them to accomplish. In any case, if you want to protect your safety net, vote Democratic!She uses the traditional old school verbiage of assuming the husband is the main bread winner and says "social security is too complicated for unisex writing". Seriously? Saying "spouse" instead of "husband" or "wife" is difficult?A flaw about her annuity example. Page 126. If you buy an annuity and die after just a couple of years, the insurance company gets your money. But she says so what, you are dead, it doesn't matter! What about your spouse or other dependents! I think it matters a lot. Not to mention that she says the annuity gave him more than his investments could have, and as I showed earlier in this review that is not true. She says annuities have a bad rap from everyone except her. I have to agree with the "everyone" and disagree with her. She keeps saying you will have a higher monthly check to spend with annuities but as I've shown above this just isn't true by a long shot. Sure, some people will like the idea of an annuity because they aren't comfortable with stocks, etc, and that is fine, but don't fool yourself that the annuity gives you more money. The feeling of safety you might get from it comes at a price, as does everything - a lower monthly check, not a higher one.Oh, and by the way she speaks of checking the rating companies like Standard and Poor's, Moody's, etc, before buying an annuity. These rating companies are dicey. They have been caught selling high ratings to companies. I wouldn't trust them as far as I could throw their office building.It's a shame that her annuity chapter is the longest, and most boring, one, since it is the least useful, since pretty much nobody should buy an annuity! Again, I think they have a bad rap for a reason. In fact, all you have to do is read her chapter on annuities and I doubt you'd ever buy one! They are a horror show sold by sleazy insurance companies. If someone suggests to you to buy an annuity, run! They are sold by criminals for the most part if you ask me.She often talks about opening an account with firms like Vanguard, Fidelity, Tiaa-Cref, etc. Unless I missed something, it is bizarre to me that she doesn't talk about the best choice of all: a discount broker. Your choices of what to invest in there are nearly infinite. Any stock, bond, mutual fund, etc, you want can be had there. Open your IRA, Roth IRA, SEP IRA, and rollover your 401K, etc., to a discount broker like TD Ameritrade, etc. The trade commissions are dirt cheap and with stock and bond investing there is zero annual commissions! I guess on page 179 I see why she might not discuss this best of options: she doesn't like or suggest individual stocks! But you can buy mutual funds, EFT’s, etc at a discount broker My portfolio went from decent but not great with mutual funds to super charged when I switched to high yield stocks. To be safe all you have to do is diversify and have a good newsletter where they watch your back. But maybe the target audience of this book is for people who are willing to take less return on their investment for not having to decide what stocks to buy.On page 260 she suggests using Quicken Financial Planner. This program is so old you'll need a version of Windows so old you may have never even heard of it! Why recommend something so old it can't possibly have current information, Hint: she is affiliated with the program, so maybe that's why she recommends it.On page 262 she says for each percentage point you pay in fees, the amount you can safely withdraw drops by about 0.4%. Can someone tell me what the math is on this? She doesn't. It seems to me that sans fees, if you can safely take out 4%, if they take 1% in fees, then you can only take out 3%. In other words, for every 1% in fees, you have to drop your withdrawal by the same 1%. Or am I missing something?Page 274. She says if you plan on selling your house, doing it sooner rather than later. That will save you from further expenses of upkeep, taxes, and insurance. She doesn't take into account rising real estate prices. If the value of the house goes up, it can go up a hell of a lot more than the cost of upkeep.Selling a home and renting to free up cash for investing is a good idea...maybe. She speaks of how it also frees up your worries. One thing she doesn't mention: you could be booted out and forced to move if you don't own the home! That doesn't sit well with me on the worry meter.Excellent section on reverse mortgages. 'Nuff said.Overall I would say that this is an excellent book for those who have little to no knowledge or confidence about financial planning and investing. For those in the know, there might be a few tidbits you didn't know about, but not much. For those looking for different ways to withdraw money from retirement accounts, which is why I bought the book, there's pretty much nothing. Of course almost none of the information in here is new. I've come across all of these concepts for many years, decades. But she does a fine job of compiling the important theories and summarizing in plain English.
Well thought out, clearly written, uncomplicated advice on how to manage your money in retirement. She constantly steers you away from complex financial schemes and warns you repeatedly that many people in the financial industry make money selling you stuff and may not have your very best interests in mind. The types of approaches she suggests are mostly simple enough that you can manage it yourself. It is fair to say her approach is somewhat conservative but she firmly believes, and repeats it over and over, that clever investing schemes rarely outperform simple index funds in the long run.Lots of good information on index funds, bonds, annuities, social security and even reverse mortgages. Many references to web sites. A really good resource for someone who is not very experienced in investing and arguably a reminder about common sense for people who (think they) are. Also some nice suggestions on planning for your life in retirement.It's the first book I read on retirement finances so plan to read at least one or two more. Has given me a lot of confidence that it's all going to work out fine.
I liked this very practical book. I'm 55 and have worked with accounting and investments all of my adult life after earning a bachelor's degree in Finance. This book will help you plan for retirement by giving solid researched practical advice about your retirement. This includes investing, withdrawing, insurance, and advice on how to keep your expenses down in retirement and live well. I plan to keep it as a reference and share with friends and family what I learned.This book is well written and kept my interest. No gimmicks. Probably would appeal most to people of some means (middle income) with retirement savings. Maybe not complex enough for the wealthy and maybe too complex for people with little savings or little ability to save.
I am 70 years old and felt this book should be read by someone who is perhaps 45-50years old or YOUNGER. She makes many good points and we had already retired and it was just too late to implement her suggestions. I also thought this book is for folks wealthier than we are. I am glad I read it and will pass it down to a friend who is younger and wealthier than me.
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