Customer Reviews

Retirement Portfolios: Theory, Construction and Management (Wiley Finance)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book helped me put my financial matters into perspective. I am an international hospitality marketer, so I understand business, but never felt confident with my handling of a retirement portfolio.

Michael Zwecher is not only a financial guru, but a pretty darn good writer, as well. I was actually able to learn how to communicate my needs to a broker in order to create the retirement package that will fit my scenario. I was pleasantly surprised with how much I learned, and how well equipped I feel to relay to my broker just what I want and what I want to avoid.

I think Retirement Portfolios will be beneficial for professionals and non-professionals alike.

Retirement Portfolios is a great book! From the first chapter I could see that this book was going to be different than most finance books. Kind of like Freakonomics, the author explains behavior within the context of a framework but without using the framework to pigeonhole. As a book about contextualizing client behavior for the goal of building a broker or planner business I've never seen a better book. This guy gets it.

I'd heard about this book from a friend of a friend who described it as "probably the most important book of a generation". I was skeptical, but its a topic that I like reading about so I bought a copy. So far I've skimmed the book, but I can see that this book delivers the goods.

I've never seen a book that describes in such a concrete way how to create portfolios for different types of people. This has everything from background economics to market segmentation. The case studies in the book are worth the price of the book. The segmentation chapter is worth the price of the book. There are several other individual chapters that are themselves worth the price of the book.

I haven't looked at the workbook yet, but I'm already in love with this book.

I can now move this review from a discussion of the galleys to a discussion of the book.

Yesterday, most clients were accumulation and investment focused. They used to say: I want you to build my wealth. Today, more and more clients are becoming distribution and retirement income focused. More and more of us are hearing more and more of them say: I want you to create a smooth standard of living.

Retirement income portfolios are about creating a smooth standard of living: First build a floor, then expose to upside.

Mike's book details what we call the "engineering approach" in the Retirement Income Industry Association's (RIIA) Retirement Management Analyst designation (RMA).

This is an important book that helps Financial Advisors and their Clients build retirement income portfolios with the tools and knowledge that they currently have.

This is why we call it the engineering approach: Work with what is on the table to deliver on the changing client goals.

It is also the first required reading in RIIA's RMA curriculum.

Disclosure: Mike and I are also the co-authors of the RMA curriculum (edited by Kerry Pechter).

For more information see: [...]