Customer Reviews

Parlay Your IRA into a Family Fortune

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Ed Slott has produced a gem of a book. His message is targeted to those of us who don't plan to use up our entire IRA savings account during our own lifetimes, but plan to leave some of those savings for our heirs. If you can make that money grow by investing wisely, Slott shows you the secret of making that money last (he calls it `stretching') for the lifetime of your beneficiary (and even longer). It really is possible to convert your IRA into a family fortune.

There are three important steps to take. The first is converting to a Roth IRA. The next is to carefully choose the correct beneficiary. It must be one person. More than one beneficiary is OK, but it's crucial to set up a new IRA account for each. Be certain that your beneficiaries understand the steps necessary to stretch their IRAs to last the lifetime of their heirs.

The third step involves hiring an IRA advisor. The laws are tricky and things must be done just right. Fortunately, Slott provides directions on just how to get started. Although I was reluctant to take this step, he points out the importance of hiring an IRA advisor and how to go about finding one who is competent. It's too important to trust just anyone.

By carefully reading this book and following the instructions, you can arrange for your savings to continue to compound - tax deferred - for years.

If I found one fault with the book, it's that it lacks advice on just how to get the money in your IRA account to grow at a satisfactory rate. These are not the 1990's and one cannot simply park money in the stock market and watch it increase in value daily. Fortunately, I recently came across another new book that fills the gap. CREATE YOUR OWN HEDGE FUND describes a method of investing that taught me how to hedge (reduce the risk of owning) a portfolio of index funds (ETFs). The book is a tutorial on how and why this method is suitable for most investors.

I recommend both books as a way to build your IRA account and make it last for generations.

Ed does a great job on giving you detailed information of how to stretch your IRA assets for the next generation. He also does a great job of including information on how to write your trust so that you can control your assets beyond the grave. This is mainly important for clients who have lots of assets in their IRAs or for people who just pass away before they use their IRA assets. Since you don't know when you are going to pass away, I think it is important to get your trust and your IRA beneficiaries set up as soon as possible.

One downside of this book is that Ed seems to sell more of his stuff - his newsletter and his training. If you read his books, I think you have most of the information you need unless you run into very complicated situations. If that happens, then I would suggest getting a good financial advisor, CPA, and an estate planning lawyer to assist you.

Ed Slott repeated alot of what was included in "The Retirement Savings Time Bomb...", so I was not as impressed with this book. You can get 98% of what to do in the "Time Bomb". But if you really want to save all your money to your kids and their kids, it should help you.

I found this book to be very helpful in my financial planning for retirement...it gives easy to follow steps,suggestions,ideas and guidelines for maximizing your IRA's,401k's and retirement funds. Ed Slott has provided us with another excellent source of information for the everyday Joes like me....he does not overwhelm you with minutia and needless facts and figures...By reading this book you may not become an IRA guru but it will enable you to ask the right questions to your professional financial planner.I have passed it on to my family members to read and make their financial plans accordingly.

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.

The author is easy to understand and makes this highly specialized material fun to read. I refer to this book and Mr Slott's other book, "The Retirement Savings Time Bomb" as my IRA Bible's. This is a must read for financial services professionals and consumers with money in IRA accounts.

This book is easy to read and comprehend. I would recommend it to anyone who has any money at all to invest in retirement. The author does not assume that everyone has hundreds of thousands of dollars to invest. The advice is sound and reasonable.

Ed Slott seems to have covered it all! it's incredible the amount of mis-information that is circulating out there!Ed clears up alot of this misinformation. We learned so much from Ed's book and now have set up our own family forever. The book is very easy to understand as it is written in plain simple english so all can follow the plan. a must read book if you want to take care of your family financially!
A Broken America

Very good information. Is vital information that would be very useful to anyone with a large IRA and a significant number of beneficiaries.