Parlay Your IRA into a Family Fortune: 3 EASY STEPS for creating a lifetime supply of tax-deferred, even tax-free, wealth for you and your family [Mass Market Paperback]

Ed Slott (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 27, 2005

Ed Slott is without a doubt "one of the country’s leading IRA experts" (Reader’s Digest). Appearing at a time when virtually everyone is concerned about retirement savings, this authoritative thoroughly accessible book presents an easy-to-follow plan for making money—a lot of money— with your IRA. Slott shows readers how to choose the right financial advisor, manage vital information and deadlines, and create a retirement fortune that will not only benefit the individual, but continue to enrich beneficiaries for generations. This powerful, straightforward tool is the book for Americans interested in creating a fiscal windfall for the future.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Ed Slott''s easy-to-understand tax strategies mean money in your bank account, not the IRS''s."
-Jan M. Rosen, coauthor of Wall Street Secrets for Tax-Efficient Investing and financial columnist for The New York Times

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author

Ed Slott is a highly sought-after financial expert whose client list includes American Express and Merrill Lynch. A frequent guest on television and radio, he is publisher of the monthly newsletter Ed Slott’s IRA Advisor.

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Mass Market Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (December 27, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0143036416
• ISBN-13: 978-0143036418
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #789,862 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Ed Slott was named "The Best" source for IRA advice by The Wall Street Journal and called "America's IRA Expert" by Mutual Funds Magazine. Ed is a widely recognized professional speaker and educator specializing in retirement distribution planning, teaching both financial advisors and consumers how to best take advantage of our complicated tax code.

Ed has created the nationally aired Public Television specials, including the all-new "Ed Slott's Retirement Rescue!", "Lower Your Taxes! Now and Forever", "Stay Rich for Life!" and "Stay Rich Forever & Ever with Ed Slott", which have been viewed by millions across America.

He also established the IRA Leadership Program and Ed Slott's Elite IRA Advisor Group, which were developed specifically to help financial institutions and advisors, financial advisor firms and insurance companies become recognized leaders in the IRA marketplace.

Ed is the author of The Retirement Savings Time Bomb and How to Defuse it (Penguin, 2012), Ed Slott's Retirement Decisions Guide: 2011 Edition (Ed Slott, 2010), Stay Rich for Life! (Ballantine Books, 2009), Parlay Your IRA Into a Family Fortune (Penguin, 2008), Your Complete Retirement Planning Road Map (Ballantine Books, 2007), and Ed Slott's IRA Advisor, a monthly IRA newsletter. He also writes personal finance columns for numerous financial publications and co-authored an extensive special report with Harry Dent titled, Taxing Away Your Wealth.

Ed has been quoted in The New York Times, Newsday, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, Time, Newsweek, Fortune Magazine, Forbes Magazine, Money Magazine, Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine, USA Today, Bloomberg Personal, Investor's Business Daily, Smart Money and a host of additional national magazines and financial publications. He has appeared on NBC, ABC, CBS, CNBC, CNN, FOX, PBS, National Public Radio, and Bloomberg TV and radio.

You can learn more at: www.IRAhelp.com
Read informative articles at: www.theslottreport.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

86 of 93 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good IRA Reference, but Stretch IRA Wildly Overhyped, July 9, 2008

By 

Donald E. Fulton (Stoneham, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Parlay Your IRA into a Family Fortune: 3 EASY STEPS for creating a lifetime supply of tax-deferred, even tax-free, wealth for you and your family (Mass Market Paperback)

This is both a very good and very bad book. Slott is a CPA and his bio indicates that he specializes in IRA law and estate planning. The retirement column in the Wall St. Journal uses him as an IRA expert. If you've seen Slott on PBS, you know he is also a pitchman and showman. This book is a mixture of expert IRA info and advice and wild overselling.

On the plus side:
This book is full of IRA information and good IRA advice presented in a very readable manner. I made dozens of notes in the front cover while reading this book. An excellent IRA reference. And I think the book does a service by pointing out that the IRA code has (sort of) a loophole that allows the 'effective' taxes paid on the IRA to be greatly reduced if the IRA is passed on to younger family members who should (Slott recommends) only take out the minimum annually over their lifetimes. Slott calls this the 'stretch' IRA.

On the negative side:
Your IRA can grow into a FAMILY FORTUNE, he screams, with pages of tables showing a 100 thousand IRA growing to millions (in one case to nearly 300 million if left to grow into well into the 21 century!). Nonsense, what about the time value of money? Slott never heard of it (or pretends he never heard of it). The reality, of course, is that if your income tax rate is, say, 33% then when you withdraw IRA funds you lose 1/3rd of it to taxes. The best that even a perfect tax strategy can do is recover this 1/3rd. Nice, but hardly a fortune.

Slott provides a useful check list of features an IRA contract should have. You would think that maybe he would read the IRA contracts of top IRA providers (like Fidelity, Vanguard) and tell us how they stack up? Nope, that's our job, not his.

Convert to a Roth IRA and your money will grow TAX FREE he screams. Slott's very positive on Roth IRA's, too positive. I worked through a Roth conversion example and find that the extra shielding that a Roth IRA allows can boost your after-tax returns a little. (Calculation details are in 'Roth Primer' section of the 'Charity' essay on my home page.) I calculate in a 6% market environment that Roth IRA will yield 6% vs an after tax yield for a traditional IRA of approx 5.4%, or an extra 0.6%/yr investment gain. However, there can be a serious downside to doing a Roth conversion that Slott doesn't mention. A large Roth conversion will likely be taxed at a much higher incremental income tax rate than normal minimum withdrawals, and since Roth has only a tiny yield advantage over a traditional IRA it could easily take a decade or more just to get even.

45 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Requried Reading for Anyone with an IRA., July 23, 2006

By 

Alexander McKelvey "Alexander" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Parlay Your IRA into a Family Fortune: 3 EASY STEPS for creating a lifetime supply of tax-deferred, even tax-free, wealth for you and your family (Mass Market Paperback)

This book focuses on ensuring that your IRA is properly set up, so that it can be passed on to beneficiaries intact, effectively establishing a "stretch IRA". The stretch IRA describes an IRA held by a beneficiary, and which will pay out over their lifetime.

This book is very well organized, and the author is clearly very enthusiastic about his subject. He does quite well making his case, that you should ensure your IRA passes intact to a beneficiary, in that it can offer them HUGE tax advantages for their entire life time.

He is also quite good about explaining the steps you need to achieve this. Much of the book is reference material that will not apply to everyone at any given time, but that is not a real criticism. The book is cheap enough, and the sections that apply to all are worth the entire purchase price.

If you have an IRA, and you have any desire to pass your assets along to a beneficiary, this book is an excellent starting point.

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Concise info on stretch IRA's, January 3, 2007

By 

M. Cheney (Kansas --beside the Santa Fe Trail) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Parlay Your IRA into a Family Fortune: 3 EASY STEPS for creating a lifetime supply of tax-deferred, even tax-free, wealth for you and your family (Paperback)

Ed Slott is considered THE expert on stretch IRA's. Book is aimed at investors who will probably die before depleting their IRA funds. It explains how to structure a stretch IRA to pass this money on to future generations with minimal taxation.

Book is better organized than Slott's previous books. It is very readable. I keep it for a reference and have purchased additional copies for gifts.