The Wall Street Journal. Complete Retirement Guidebook: How to Plan It, Live It and Enjoy It Reviews
by david on Tuesday, January 31st, 2012 | 3 Comments
The Wall Street Journal. Complete Retirement Guidebook: How to Plan It, Live It and Enjoy It
As you think about retirement, you’ve got facts to face, planning to do, decisions to make and numbers to crunch. With the experts at The Wall Street Journal to guide you, you’ll learn how to tailor a financial plan for the lifestyle you want.
• Answers your biggest question—How big does my nest egg need to be?—by linking it to your particular hopes for how you want to spend your days in retirement
• Shows how to translate your dreams and interests into daily activities, w
• Shows how to translate your dreams and interests into daily activities, w
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Making Retirement Sound Too Much Like Work,
In the pharmaceutical world, there are "me too" drugs, which are brought to market by companies that want part of the action for a particular type of best-selling drug. The purpose of the new offering is not to bring something better to the market, or to bring something cheaper to the market, the purpose is to gain some market share of an already existing market.
This may be the primary reason behind the publication of this new book. Kiplinger's has had a book out there for more than a decade. It covers essentially the same ground. I'm sure that there are other books in this same survey category that I am not familiar with. The point is that this book turns out, at best, to be a "me too" book for the Journal.
But, what if that were not the case, and this book were to be judged on its own merit? Then what? An early question could be who is the book written for? My experience tells me that once folks are retired a year or so, they are past the point of seeking retirement advice from a book. The Kiplinger's book says that its focus is on ages 50-65 and for those who are "in or out of the workplace." This sounds like the audience is mostly pre-retirees. With that in mind, let's look at this new book, itself.
We're told that the book addresses "both money and time." Wisely, the "time" section come first; otherwise, like so many other high-level books on retirement, the financials might end up with more space than they should in the overall effort. At least the "time" section has a chance to shine if it goes first.
Unfortunately, the time section is not much of an "upper." Instead, it is filled with warning and negatives and much of the stuff that reinforces any anxiety someone might have about retirement before reading the book. We're told that any "assumption" that someone is going to like retirement better than work is "dangerous," especially for "people who have enjoyed their careers." And we're told about a couple for which "rest and relaxation didn't hold much appeal." Instead, these guys enter the wine business "in retirement." We're told that it was "nerve-wracking," that they end up with 15 employees and that they begin producing thousands of bottles of wine per year. We're told that this story is "encouraging." But what does it have to do with "retirement?"
Then we learn about another guy who tried retirement, but returns to the workplace, saying, "A huge piece of my life was totally gone." Then, another guy who retires from IBM, only to open a "small travel business." Define "small travel business." Sounds not like "retirement" to me.
But, alas, there is one paragraph in this "time" section that tells those of us who might want to embrace the "traditional" retirement, which it equates to playing golf all the time, having drinks before dinner and not much else, that this is just fine with the authors. However, it is quite obvious in my reading that this is NOT the recommended way to go.
In fact, the next chapter is all about working in retirement, of all things. It features many of the leading myths on the subject, such as "A number of studies have found that an overwhelming number of Baby Boomers expect to keep working in retirement." And we meet people for which work in retirement helps them pay their bills, or gets them medical insurance and even gets them "out of bed" in the morning. We're given advice on how to get and/or keep a job in retirement, including the use of life coaches and employment firms. This is about "retirement?"
We're well into the book by now, and it is getting painfully obvious that this is not really a book about the pleasures of retirement. No, next we'll get advice on volunteering in retirement, and relocating in retirement, the latter of which finds a way to give an early plug for long-term-care insurance, which will get a ton of coverage later. Then, we get a chapter on Health and Fitness, which takes the opportunity to tell us that the marketing folks at Fidelity Investments say that we're going to need more money than we could have possibly imagined just to cover our basic medical costs in retirement. And, we're told, "That estimate doesn't even include long-term care…" Bummer.
And this is the good news, folks. Now, we come to the second half, which is on the financials of retirement. And guess what? Now, we get to be scared about money! "The big risk, of course, is that your savings will expire before you do," we're told. And that in recent years financial planners have begun to say that we'll need 100 percent or more of our pre-retirement income in retirement, because we should expect expenses to increase, not decrease.
We're given an example of a couple's retirement budget that leaves them with some money for discretionary expenses, only after they…
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|Smart and well-researched,
Ruffenach and Greene have been writing about retirement issues for the WSJ for nearly a decade — and this book reflects their deep knowledge of the subject. They realize how much retirement has changed in the last generation (this ain't your father's retirement) and their book is a great combination of the nuts and bolts stuff you need to know and the stories that make this a highly readable piece of journalism. So many retirement books focus on nothing but the financial aspects — put away X dollars, buy this annuity, how to do a reverse mortgage, blah blah — but Ruffenach and Greene have added the important elements of "Live It and Enjoy It." The result is worth adding to any bookshelf for people 40 – 80.
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|WSJ Completely Boring Guidebook,
I hoped for a stronger content from the authors of The Wall Street Journal, but you can throw this one onto the heap of self help books that get bogged down by inane stories of lucky people. If I were the editor, I could have paired this book down to about 25 pages by just cutting out the fluff. Perhaps the folks at WSJ need to go back to journalism school to remind themselves of how to simplify the content.
Once I finally dug out the "golden nuggets" of wisdom, I was left with the feeling that I have heard it all before. Nothing earth shattering happening here. Nothing you could not discover free by heading over to the hundreds of web sites that deal with money and planning.
All in all, if you want to spend three hours reading about people doing things greater and more profitable than you, this is the book for you.
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