Customer Reviews

Securing a Retirement Income for Life: Strategies for Managing, Protecting and Preserving Your Wealth, 2nd Edition

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I have finally found a book written by a Certified Financial Planner who provides a concise explanation of the investment process used by investment pros to accumulate money for retirement along with the research and illustrations to back it up. Hypothetical case scenarios show how integrating your retirement plan with other aspects of your financial life will protect you against the risk of outliving your money and other unforeseen events.

This book shows you very methodically how to determine the amount of money needed to provide a retirement income for the rest of your life. It covers the methods for managing your retirement funds and how to protect them from among other things an extended market decline. Unlike other books on the subject, Griffith provides questionnaires and tables to guide you through the process of understanding your own retirement needs and objectives. He tells you what you should be looking out for not only in investing but also with rising expenses, such as healthcare, increasing inflation and tax issues. The author gives you not only the positive side to certain issues but also some of the negatives.

If you are looking for a guide to teach you how to invest for retirement and how to make sure that your retirement income will last for the rest of your life, then I would suggest you start here. It will keep you from making the mistakes that the vast majority of people make causing them to outlive their resources.

If you are looking for an investment professional, this book will answer many of your questions and make you an educated client.

You should buy this book.

Written by Bill Griffith Jr. (principal of W.E. Griffith & Associates, a fee-based wealth management firm), Securing a Retirement Income for Life is a no-nonsense guide to what, in today's era of long life spans, is becoming an increasingly lengthy stage of adult life. Securing a Retirement Income for Life addresses how much to accumulate to provide a stable retirement income and fully address one's quality of life needs, how to prepare for uncertainties most effectively when confronted with unknown future variables, addressing healthcare risks, choosing the right financial advisor for one's needs, and much more. Written in plain terms for the lay reader, Securing a Retirement Income for Life features a wealth of easy-to-use tables for quickly estimating relevant figures, as well as an index for cross-reference, and is especially recommended for anyone confused by myriad options for retirement planning.

This book has changed my life! To achieve my retirement income goal, I learned how to accumulate a portfolio of over $2.4 million. I am so fortunate to have read Securing a Retirement Income for Life.

If you are serious about becoming financially independent, this book is for you. This is not the kind of book that you read, get excited about then ask yourself, "Okay, what do I do now? You are going to know what to do. It's the next best thing to having a Certified Financial Planner work with you "one on one." The great thing about this book is that you can be working on your own dreams, your own goals, how much you want to make as you are reading. You'll need a calculator but everything else is provided for you - right in the book.

Unlike other books on the subject, Securing a Retirement Income for Life is written by a Certified Financial Planner who has experience working with clients on a daily basis. His firm is known for having expertise in retirement income and distribution planning.

In this book, you will learn about proven strategies to ensure a consistent and reliable flow of income for your lifetime. How managing your retirement plan is different after you retire and how to change the way you invest during retirement. You will learn how to protect your retirement funds from uncertainties such as how long you will live, changes in rates of return and inflation. I discovered strategies the wealthy use to build and preserve their wealth.

Griffith covers the important topic of asset allocation and how a well-defined portfolio allows for several stages of lifestyle and cash flow during the extended retirement many people hope to experience. He discusses the importance of integrating your retirement plan with other aspects of your financial picture, such as investments, legacy planning and tax issues. This is what I think makes this book different from others on the subject. You will learn how your retirement plan fits in with your overall financial situation. You will learn a lot more than just how to build wealth. You will learn how to protect and preserve it. After all, who wants to have nearly half of a million-dollar portfolio wiped out because of one costly mistake?

Overall, I highly recommend this book, which serves as a "roadmap" demonstrating exactly how you can start from where you are right now to achieve your goal of financial independence.

I bought this book and More Money for Retirement Right Now: Unlock the Equity in Your Assets, Create Immediate Income and Live a Richer Life, which is also written by Bill Griffith, because I was concerned about my investments and retirement plan with all the market volatility and uncertainty in our current economy.

I've read less expensive books on retirement planning but I never learned as much as I did from this one. This book provides all the information and tools to achieve financial freedom based on the lifestyle you are dreaming about. It shows how to increase the probability of meeting your retirement income goal and how to maintain your standard of living during retirement.

Griffith presents the opportunities and challenges that can have a tremendous impact on your retirement savings and security. Those who are near retirement age will find out how to rearrange their funds to receive a steady stream of income throughout their retirement years and how to protect their money from a decline in the market and from other risks that most people don't usually think about. Those who are younger and still saving for retirement cannot afford to miss the opportunity to build more wealth for retirement by following the important topics discussed in this book.

One of the most important features of this book is that it describes how to design an investment strategy using protective tax savings vehicles to build and protect your wealth and how you cannot rely on your investments alone. If you haven't given much thought to retirement planning, you may be shocked by what you learn but you might be able to do something about it now. I've realized that retirement can be a very long stage of life and my employer is not gong to fund it - that's my job - so it requires some careful thought and planning.

This book has so much important information that you don't want to miss. But that's not all. . . The exercises in this book are extremely important and completing them will help you understand your own possibilities much better. Retirement isn't all about money. It's about the life you would like to live. I am more confident about my retirement and excited about the opportunities that lie ahead. Overall, I would highly recommend this book to anyone who would like to be more proactive in planning a fulfilling retirement and to anyone who would like to increase their retirement savings and feel more confident about achieving their goal of financial independence and security in retirement.

This edition, published in 2009, is based on an earlier one published prior to the financial collapse of 2007. And the reviews of the book heretofore have been done before the collapse as well. I wonder how many of those who reviewed the book then now have portfolios that have suffered and impaired their retirement standard of living today? The book certainly has historical value, but as a plan for the future, it is doubtful that ANY financial book can guide anyone through the pitfalls of investing anymore. All investing is based on certain assumptions held true for many years that have been shattered by the greed of Wall Street and the institutional incompetency of government regulators. Today, we still hear the mantra about staying the course with the expectation that eventually the market will go up; yet we see constant buying and selling on a short term to elicit quick profit taking. We are asked to rebalance our portfolios in light of the decimation of our holdings. But re-arranging where we now have our money will not change the fact that investors have lost wealth no matter how it is placed. Index funds were the rage because of their low cost, but we now see that the low cost is a minimal advantage in a declining market where careful stock picking among the bones of the S&P 500 brings better results. My advice for retirement: consider what you have right now, gauge your life expectancy, and get out as soon as you are able with what you have right now, relying on Social Security early retirement benefits and perhaps a small job to make ends meet until the market goes up. If you are within three or four years of retirement, working those extra years will not amass you any greater wealth because you will not have the early Social Security retirement benefits to use and the money you invest will not have sufficient time to grow appreciably for the risks of investing before you have to take your minimum distributions. Quite simply: you are out of time, pal! So enjoy what you have now before the government or Wall Street takes it all later, either through taxes, inflation, or spurious unregulated investment schemes. If you think I am a disgruntled loser in the game, perish the thought. The day the market tanked in October, 2007, I quit my job and have no regrets. Good luck!