Recommended Book(s) in Preparation for Retirement

[tippedears]

[Topic is now in Personal Finance (Not Investing) - mod mkc]

Greetings, newbie here.

Can you guys please recommend some good books that I can read for the preparation of retirement?

My dear wife has recently been talking a lot about us retiring in the next couple of years.
She would be near or at her SS FRA at that point.
At that point, I would still have 4-5 years to go until my SS FRA (and about 2-3 years before Medicare eligiblity).
However, she does not want to wait that long.

I would like to learn some basic, sound approaches that people enact when they go into their retirement.
For example, whether one should convert some lump sum of their porfolio into cash at the beginning of their retirement (or TIPS) to minimize sequence of return risk or just withdraw as you go cometh hell or high water?
I would also like to learn about other things such as methods to optimize taxation and which types of accounts one should withdraw first, etc.

Thanks!

[FiveK]

Not books, but some links you may find useful:

Open Social Security: Free, Open-Source Social Security Calculator
Withdrawal methods - Bogleheads
Roth conversion - Bogleheads

[Parkinglotracer]

Welcome to the forum !!

I don’t have any book recommendations but using the search button in the forum is a good place to start for reading on topics to figure out what you are comfortable with to prepare for retirement I think.

We are 63 and retired at 60. We have 3 rough spreadsheets (one can do this as easily by hand too) where we look ahead for financial and tax planning. The planning are estimates not perfect.

I keep a spending budget spreadsheet that estimates how much money we need to pull out of our investments yearly. It is rough but accounts for what we have spent historically. If we add up what has gone out of our checking account in a year we know what we spend. Sometimes only allah knows where it goes. lol. We plan for lumpy expenses such as cars or roofs too if we can predict it in years where it may happen.

We do a bucket approach where we keep 3 years or so of our needed retirement spending out of stock market in post tax mm fund and 3-5 yr treasury ladder ready now bucket so we are not forced to sell large amounts of equities in prolonged bear markets. This feeds our checking account when needed. Ideally one might have that money set aside when retiring imho. It’s been so long since we have had a prolonged bear market I still want to be ready.

There is a new wiki here in boglehead land about where to withdraw first. We are saving our roths for last to withdraw from and hope to leave some to kids and we pull out the assets we will pay least tax on first to spend. As some have said it’s good to have some tax deferred ira available end game because it may be one will have high nursing home bills and pay very little taxes those years right before we die.

I have second spreadsheet where I estimate our annual income taxes next year and then we do small Roth conversions to stay in current MFJ 22% tax bracket and now at age 63 IRMAA limits. After a reading.m A lot that is what I am comfortable with. There are very detailed conversion planners like pralana gold or such but I am not going to do 200K conversions and pay the tax bomb now on that so we do we do 50K or so conversions a year. You may have to decide what path you will take. We have pensions, dividend, interest, inherited Ira rmds, SS, few capital gains from stock sales on occasion, and then Roth conversion taxable income. You can estimate next year federal and state taxes via turbo tax or other on line planners. I find it easier to do by excel or hand / it’s only 4 or 5 lines of income from the above listed sources for us.

Third spreadsheet is really rough and tries to predict our income, investment growth, any individual year of large tax events like good amount of ibonds maturing for us in 2030, rmds starting when we are 75 and taxes we will pay yearly for the long term . I use a conservative after inflation 3 % growth and 22% federal, 4% state tax bill. We could go up to 25- 28% tax bracket in future but that’s ok. Just use long term spreadsheet to see what may be coming to plan ahead.

So thinking thru and reading up here on forum on how you will handle those topics may be of help.

Social retirement life:
I retired at age 50 for 3 years then went back to old job for 7 years. Then retired at 60. I retired before DW and that made it harder to synchronize schedule to do things especially travel. It is better when we both retired I think. It’s good to have a plan for what one is planning to do to enjoy your retirement years as it isn’t all financial. I call retirement rewirement because it is a different life and one needs to rewire themselves based upon their current wiring and habits. Who you are going to socialize with? what activities you are going to do? Sometimes it takes planning just like any goal in life. There are a few books out there on those topics too. At age 63 we are enjoying playing pickleball with friends a few times a week. We walk some. We stay near family down south in winter. We visit kids and travel a little. We have a small boat. We enjoy doing small projects around the houses and pay people to do the big projects. We spend time with friends and family. Go years as they say while our health is good. After a couple years of retiring we have found ourselves as busy as we want to be with enough money to fund our interests . We are the lucky ones. Hope you both are the same in the future.

Lots of smart people here on forum and they will help you get as detailed as you want on almost any retirement topic. I think the key is to learn enough to understand the impact of your decisions and then decide how to proceed. We do a 5 year treasury ladder for our fixed income portfolio. I don’t like bond funds especially when rate rise. Not that anyone can predict when rates will rise. We use Mainly index funds for equities. I see you mentioned tips and I have not learned enough and gotten comfortable enough to buy tips but some do - you can learn about those by searching forum too.

Good luck.

[Lou354]

Jane Bryant Quinn, How To Make Your Money Last.

[LeeMKE]

Retirement Planning Guidebook: Navigating the Important Decisions for Retirement Success (The Retirement Researcher Guide Series)
by Wade Pfau

Over 50? Save yourself time and bother by starting with this book
(this is my review of this book on Amazon)
Reviewed in the United States on September 7, 2021
Verified Purchase

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.


And I second the suggestion to read the Wiki here, and watch the forum for questions you will want to read.

[retired@50]

Greetings, newbie here.

Can you guys please recommend some good books that I can read for the preparation of retirement?

The wiki has a list (see link below). I've read most of them. My advice is to head down to your local public library and check out the financial section.

https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Book_re ... Retirement

Regards,

[tippedears]

Thanks.

[ruralavalon]

For a good overall discussion, read The Bogleheads' Guide To Retirement Planning.

Start planning by determining your retirement spending needs/wants. Begin with your current actual spending over the last several years (to avoid missing expenses that do not recur on a regular basis). Then subtract expenses that will end or reduce on retirement (like mortgage payments, college expenses for children, contributions to retirement accounts), and add expenses that will increase with retirement (like travel, hobbies, recreation). Be sure to include both taxes and healthcare spending and insurance premmiums.

We did not convert any part of our portfolio to cash when beginning retirement.

About one year before retirement we stopped automatic reinvestment of dividends in our taxable brokerage account. That way any shares sold from the taxable brokerage account after retirement would have only long-term capital gains.

In the first years of my retirement we generated money for spending needs (in addition to the dividends from the taxable brokerage account no longer automatically reinvested) by selling shares of stock index funds held in our joint brokerage account, and rebalanced by exchanging between funds inside my rollover IRA.

[Squirrel208]

Here you go... I copied your thread topic title and pasted it into the search function. (This topic has been asked and answered many times here.)

[deserat]

Retirement is a transition to another stage in life. Most people who frequent here have the financial aspect of that fairly well taken care of and there are numerous resources to assist with that. Where most have issues is in the emotional aspect, purpose aspect and activity aspect. There are Boglehead Stages groups dedicated to these different aspects as well as the different stages to/in retirement. I would suggest that while you are looking at the financial aspects you take a look at some of the other aspects. I also liked the book "How to Retire Happy Wild and Free" by E Zelinski (he posts here and at the WSJ comment section at times) and "You don't need a million to retire" by Nolo Press - both of these books look at the other aspects of retiring.

Best wishes on your transition - I am going through it myself right now.

[billj]

For a good overall discussion, read The Bogleheads' Guide To Retirement Planning.
...

Can anyone comment on whether or not this book is still valuable, relevant, and comprehensive in 2024? I'm a little concerned that the book was published in 2011. Surely things have changed over the past 13 years???

[beernutz]

I enjoyed and recommend both:
How to Retire by Christine Benz
and
Keys to a Successful Retirement by Fritz Gilbert

I read Gilbert's book the year before retiring (4 years ago) and just read Benz's book this year. Both have good actionable advice imo.

[forestcity]

As I head down the homestretch to retirement and have thought and read a great deal about the topic over the last year+, I've found 3 books (all referenced already) to be particularly useful:
-How to Make Your Money Last, Jane Bryant Quinn
-Retirement Planning Guidebook, Wade Pfau
-How to Retire, Christine Benz

All 3 of these touch helpfully on the non-financial aspects of retirement, as well as containing a wealth of financial information.

[TipsQuestions]

The most popular retirement book is also the best IMO: https://www.amazon.com/How-Retire-Happy ... /096941949

[Beck49]

Your post suggests you have some concern about generating a stable retirement income. I would recommend you consider M. Zwecher - Retirement Portfolios for background reading. It puts the top (but not only) priority on first developing a stable income stream in retirement. Good luck. (P.S. It is not an easy read, but it is worth the effort).

[ruralavalon]

[Topic is now in Personal Finance (Not Investing) - mod mkc]

. . . . .

I would like to learn some basic, sound approaches that people enact when they go into their retirement.
For example, whether one should convert some lump sum of their porfolio into cash at the beginning of their retirement (or TIPS) to minimize sequence of return risk or just withdraw as you go cometh hell or high water?
I would also like to learn about other things such as methods to optimize taxation and which types of accounts one should withdraw first, etc.

Thanks!

We did not establish a large cash allocation. In the first years of retirement we relied on Social Security benefits, and for more spending sold shares of stock index funds in our joint taxable account (rebalancing by exchanging between funds inside my rollover IRA).

Later Social Security benefits plus Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs) have been more than enough for retirement spending needs.

In general it may be best to withdraw first from taxable brokerage accounts, second from traditional tax-deferred accounts, and last from Roth accounts.

[heyyou]

Read as many of the recommended books as you can, from the library, then only buy the ones that are keepers. The general info may be similar from the different authors (which is confirmation), but often a few writers will just suit you better than most of the other ones.

Delaying Social Security is very good since it significantly boosts the amount, and SS has annual COLA increases that matter when inflation is high. Delaying SS gives you time to do annual Roth conversions at less tax during those delay years, which are your best annual investments after your work income ceases. Note how doing each Roth conversion early in the year, gives those conversions most of an extra year of stock growth instead of waiting until late in the year to start the conversion paperwork. The future untaxed growth of the stock index funds in your now larger Roth IRA is very welcome as retirement progresses into your RMD years with your now smaller tIRA where your bond index funds are stored for their lower expected growth.

[nanciT]

We just retired. My spouse a few months ago, and myself a year ago. I have been on this site for a few years and cannot tell you how much I have leaned and how valuable it is.

I started by going to the search bar and reading threads related to retirement, Social Security, IRMMA and I could go on and on. There is a Wealth of information here and so many great posters who will give great information and advice.

Welcome!