Retirement Planning Guidebook Chapter 1

Wade Pfau has gotten so much into the math of retirement planning that his previous academic title was Professor of Retirement Income. With his wealth of knowledge, he's decided to write a series of books: 

Retirement Planning Guidebook: Navigating the Important Decisions for Retirement Success 

Reverse Mortgages: How to use Reverse Mortgages to Secure Your Retirement

Safety-First Retirement Planning: An Integrated Approach for a Worry-Free Retirement and

How Much Can I Spend in Retirement?: A Guide to Investment-Based Retirement Income Strategies


In this first book of the series, he walks through the major topics of generating retirement income that the other three books cover in-depth, as well as Social Security, Medicare, and Long Term Care planning.

In the first chapter, he stresses that there are multiple income strategies and that there are certain strategies that resonate more strongly with some, and other strategies that work well for others. There is more beyond the idea of saving money, investing it, and waiting until you have enough to retire and living off the proceeds (and the principle much further on if necessary). There are folks that prefer to keep downside protection with annuities or seeking jobs that provide pensions. Since pensions aren't easy to come by anymore, and all I heard about annuities were that they were bad deals, sold by insurance salesmen, I wasn't interested in hearing that side of the equation. However, his reasoned approach has me at least interested in reading the beginning of that chapter when I get there.

Pfau also offered his Retirement Income Style Awareness quiz for me to take, which I did this afternoon. Not too surprisingly, my style is Total Returns Investing.


In short, I expect the market to gain a lot more than I can spend for most years, and if that doesn't pan out on occasion, I will shift my spending to allow the market to catch up. I guess it's nice to see what I expected my answers to be correlate with the strategy I figure to be the best for my situation.

Chapter 2 is next, Retirement Risks.


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