*This is the Revised 2024 Book Edition published in January 2024* The Retirement Planning Guidebook helps you navigate through the important decisions to prepare for your best retirement. You will have the detailed knowledge and understanding to make smart retirement decisions:
– Understand your personal retirement income style, which can then help you navigate through the conflicting opinions about retirement strategies to choose your right path.
– Learn about investment and insurance tools that may best resonate with your personal style.
– Determine if you are financially prepared for retirement by quantifying your financial goals (annual spending, legacy, and reserves for the unexpected) and comparing them to your available assets.
– Make smart decisions for when to start Social Security benefits, which could potentially support an additional $100,000 or more of lifetime income from Social Security.
– Develop a plan for making the best initial and ongoing choices from the alphabet soup of Medicare options, as well as how to find health coverage if you retire before Medicare eligibility.
– Assess where you wish to live in retirement and whether there are helpful ways to incorporate housing wealth into your retirement strategy.
– Decide how to manage your long-term care risk between self-funding, Medicaid, or private insurance, and take steps to support living at home for as long as possible.
– Understand how to manage your taxes to pay less, to avoid common pitfalls, and to have more for your lifetime and your legacy. You will be able to apply tax diversification, asset location, tax bracket management, and Roth conversions to enhance the sustainability of your retirement assets.
– Get your finances organized and understand how to get your estate and incapacity planning documents in order, including your will, account titling, beneficiary designations, financial power of attorney, and advance health care directives.
– Identify whether there is a role for trusts in your estate plan for reasons related to avoiding probate, controlling how and when assets are disbursed, obtaining creditor protections, or helping to manage estate taxes.
– Prepare for the non-financial aspects of retirement, including the need to find purpose and passion, to understand if there is a role for work in retirement, to enhance relationships and social connections, and to maintain an active and healthy lifestyle.
Retirement has an entire vocabulary associated with it. We’ll demystify the 4% rule, sequence-of-return risk, time segmentation and buckets, reverse mortgages, income annuities, variable annuities, fixed index annuities, long-term care insurance, living trusts, irrevocable trusts, budgeting, the funded ratio, Medicare Advantage, Medicare supplements, diversified investment portfolios, Roth conversions, the hazards of the Social Security tax torpedo and increased Medicare premiums, buffer assets, 401(k) plans and IRAs, the rollover decision, distribution options for defined-benefit company pensions, required minimum distributions, qualified charitable distributions, aging in place, cognitive decline, and so much more.
The Retirement Planning Guidebook does not let important matters fall through the cracks. This is a comprehensive look at the key retirement decisions to achieve financial and non-financial success. You will have the foundation to make the most of your retirement years, and I hope you’ll be able to do something great!
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LeeMKE –
WHAT IS NEW IN THIS BOOK
The RISA score was invented and verified by Wade and his sidekick Alex Murguia. This is a new tool you will not see elsewhere. You need to start with this tool. It will make sorting all the options much easier. Once you understand your own RISA score, you’ll quickly sort through possibilities and confidently discard the poor fits so you can focus on the options that suit you best.
WHY SHOULD SOMEONE BUY THIS BOOK
I spent 2 years, full-time, studying my options for withdrawals from a retirement portfolio I’d been saving for decades. The deeper I got, the more options I found to investigate. It was certainly a rabbit hole, and once I finally was satisfied that I had examined all the options, understood the pros and cons of the options I chose, I finally felt ready to put together a withdrawal plan and tweak my investment plan.
If this guidebook had been available, I could have shaved 18 months off that 2 year study. Options that would never fit would have been eliminated from study if I’d had this book. I wasted a lot of time studying options that others were using, because I wanted to be sure I wasn’t overlooking something. And many things I spent time worrying and fussing over, would have been confirmed if I’d had this guidebook.
WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?
I have an MBA and went to law school. How the heck will less educated savers navigate this? I’ve worried about that for the last 4 years. While I was worrying, Wade Pfau was building a solution.
I never would have guessed that spending my savings would be harder than building my savings. All of us seem surprised by this, as we reach the peak, take a few selfies, and then ponder how to get down the mountain safely.
Before you meet with a financial advisor, a financial planner, or your cousin’s brother-in-law who is an insurance agent, read this book. You’ll be more of an informed consumer, and not a “sheep being lead to slaughter” which is how we are referred to in the industry.
This is aptly named as a guidebook. Most chapters have a checklist for your use. All chapters have reference books for the over-achievers among us. (I read most of those plus a pile of less helpful books.) At the end, a checklist of tasks will keep you on track. This book is your homework, for the most important test you face, retirement!
WHO SHOULD BUY THIS BOOK
Anyone over age 50 is a candidate for this book. A careful reading will be amply rewarded by a more secure retirement, which is worth much more than the price of the book and the value of your study time.
WHO IS THE AUTHOR?
Wade Pfau is well known as a financial researcher, and specializes in retirement planning. I’ve read his other books, and many of his papers. Wade is deliberate and cautious in his approach. He is among a handful of authors and researchers I follow and pay close attention to.
Amazon Customer –
All I can say is that this book covers EVERYTHING!!! It is very informative and I would recommend it to everyone, especially if trying to figure out how to retire.
Arteagles –
By far, this is the most comprehensive retirement book I have read. I like the approach Dr. Pfau takes in terms of matching assets with liabilities and suggesting various tools based on the retiree’s personality characteristics. In particular, I had never thought of annuities as an option for retirement, and now believe they would be a very good tool for our part of our planning. Several other times in this book I found myself surprised by options which I did not realize existed even though I had read many retirement books.
On the minus side, it is a a bit of a complicated and therefore slow read. Some of the concepts like discount rates and planning age were not explained in any detail, and required separate reading for me to understand. It took me around 2 months to read this book a little a time. That said, I believe it is a great book and am glad I purchased it. I feel I need to ramp up a bit on the terminology to get the most out of this book.
I plan to re-read it again in a couple months and will probably get even more out of it the second time.
Julian –
This book consider all aspects of retirement, for someone living in the US. It is an incredible book, because he discuss all the different strategies/views for retirement.
Randy –
This is an amazing amount of information and guidance. Extremely thorough, and considers multiple scenarios. It goes way beyond investment advice, which honestly is only one part of retirement planning, and in my opinion, not the most important part.
You will absolutely learn a lot, and if you apply what you learn, have a much more successful retirement.
I have not read any other guide that is as useful and complete.
The only warning, is that it is a ton of information, and somewhat “dry” reading.
The second and third time through helps even more. I have read this 1 year before, and now 2 years after. It has allowed us to make a lot of good decisions that so far are working out well.