Retirement Planning Guidebook

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 over your lifetime.

- 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!

Writing this book has been a nine-year long passion project. This is the book I always intended to write, and the other three books in the Retirement Researcher Guide Series were spun-off along the way as my writing on some of these topics became so long that they constituted separate books on their own. Three of the chapters in this book summarize other books in this series, and ten of the chapters present new and original content. Let me show with Retirement Planning Guidebook's Table of Contents how the other books in this series fit in:

Chapter 1: Retirement Income Styles and Decisions

Chapter 2: Retirement Risks

Chapter 3: Quantifying Goals and Assessing Preparedness

Chapter 4: Sustainable Spending from Investments [Summarizes How Much Can I Spend in Retirement?]

Chapter 5: Annuities and Risk Pooling [Summarizes Safety-First Retirement Planning]

Chapter 6: Social Security

Chapter 7: Medicare and Health Insurance

Chapter 8: Long-Term Care Planning

Chapter 9: Housing Decisions in Retirement [Summarizes Reverse Mortgages and adds new content]

Chapter 10: Tax Planning for Efficient Retirement Distributions

Chapter 11: Legacy and Incapacity Planning

Chapter 12: The Non-Financial Aspects of Retirement Success

Chapter 13: Putting it All Together