Retirement Planning Guidebook: Navigating the Important Decisions for Retirement Success

The Retirement Planning Guidebook navigates you through the important decisions to prepare for your best retirement. You with the detailed knowledge and understanding to make smart decisions:

Understand your personal retirement income style, which can then help you navigate through the conflicting advice about investments and annuities to choose your right path. Many retirement books focus on just one retirement style, indicating a one-size fits all approach to readers. But here you will find balanced coverage for a range of valid approaches. The best choice for you depends on your personal preferences.

Learn about the types of investment and insurance tools that may better resonate with your retirement income 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 retirement.

Develop a plan for health insurance if you retire before Medicare eligibility, and for making the best initial and ongoing choices from the alphabet soup of Medicare options.

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.

Assess where you wish to live in retirement and whether there are helpful ways to incorporate housing wealth into your retirement strategy.

Understand how to manage your retirement plan to pay taxes at the lowest possible rates and to improve the sustainability of your assets, and become the life of the party with your understanding of tax diversification, asset location, tax bracket management, Roth conversions, the Social Security tax torpedo, and the risk of increased Medicare premiums. A case study shows how smart tax and Social Security decisions can help retirement assets to last for 5.6 more years.

Get your finances organized and understand how to get your estate and incapacity planning documents in order, including your will, account titles, beneficiary designations, financial power of attorney, and advance health care directives.

Identify whether trusts may be helpful to 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 so that potential negatives can become positives. Work provides more than just income, as it is also a source of social connections, personal identity, and daily routine. You will know how to find a new identity, new passions, and to enhance your relationships with family and friends.

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, budgets, Roth conversions, buffer assets, 401(k) plans and IRAs, distribution options for defined-benefit company pensions, aging in place, and much more.

I don't 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!