Yes, You Can Still Retire Comfortably!

by Ben Stein and Phil DeMuth

Book Overview

The specter of retirement is haunting the baby-boom generation. The generation that's used to having it all is suddenly finding that it doesn't have enough. Ben Stein and Phil DeMuth show you how to get back on track. They outline the steps you can take today to assure your future tomorrow. Backed up with facts and figures, they lay out exactly how much you need to save in order to maintain your standard of living, and how to invest your dollars to...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1401903185
• ISBN13: 9781401903183
• Release Date: August 2005
• Publisher: Hay House
• Length: 222 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.3" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Full of sound advice

I was very impressed with this book. It is full of sound advice for both the accumulation phase and distribution phase of investing. The author's simple 2 Index Fund approach will probably beat most active fund approaches plus you can do other things besides managing your portfolio full time. The authors also allowed up to a 50:50 split in the stock portion of their asset allocation between domestic and foreign stocks. I also enjoyed their comparisons of alternative withdrawal strategies during the distribution phase. The book has an excellent explanation of why companies can give a higher payout ratio to immediate annuity investors versus investors self-annuitizing their portfolio. This magic is due to insurance companies being able to pool their risks and plan for an average lifetime where investors must plan for their maximum versus average lifetime. I found no flaws in their methodology for planning how much you need to save for retirement. The combination of tables (with spreadsheets on their web site) is a little complex to follow. It would have been nice if they put it together into one financial planning program on their web site. Last, the authors have reached the same conclusion I have based upon the net worth and US savings rates data: Most Boomers will not save and invest enough to retire when they want to. The only choices that will be left to them are work longer, buy immediate annuities, sell your house using a reverse mortgage, or sell your house and trade down to a smaller house in an area with a lower cost of living. I would suggest companion books to supplement this book including: The Richest Man in Babylon Bogle on Mutual Funds: New Perspectives for the Intelligent Investor The Millionaire Next Door The Four Pillars of Investing: Lessons for Building a Winning Portfolio A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing, Ninth Edition Index Mutual Funds: How to Simplify Your Financial Life and Beat the Pro's The Coffeehouse Investor: How to Build Wealth, Ignore Wall Street, and Get On With Your Life The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing Wealth: Grow It, Protect It, Spend It, and Share It All About Asset Allocation.

Full of sound advice

I was very impressed with this book. It is full of sound advice for both the accumulation phase and distribution phase of investing. The author's simple 2 Index Fund approach will probably beat most active fund approaches plus you can do other things besides managing your portfolio full time. The authors also allowed up to a 50:50 split in the stock portion of their asset allocation between domestic and foreign stocks. I also enjoyed their comparisons of alternative withdrawal strategies during the distribution phase. The book has an excellent explanation of why companies can give a higher payout ratio to immediate annuity investors versus investors self-annuitizing their portfolio. This magic is due to insurance companies being able to pool their risks and plan for an average lifetime where investors must plan for their maximum versus average lifetime. I found no flaws in their methodology for planning how much you need to save for retirement. The combination of tables (with spreadsheets on their web site) is a little complex to follow. It would have been nice if they put it together into one financial planning program on their web site. Last, the authors have reached the same conclusion I have based upon the net worth and US savings rates data: Most Boomers will not save and invest enough to retire when they want to. The only choices that will be left to them are work longer, buy immediate annuities, sell your house using a reverse mortgage, or sell your house and trade down to a smaller house in an area with a lower cost of living. I would suggest companion books to supplement this book including: The Richest Man in Babylon Bogle on Mutual Funds: New Perspectives for the Intelligent Investor The Millionaire Next Door The Four Pillars of Investing: Lessons for Building a Winning Portfolio A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing, Ninth Edition The Coffeehouse Investor: How to Build Wealth, Ignore Wall Street, and Get On With Your Life The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing Wealth: Grow It, Protect It, Spend It, and Share It All About Asset Allocation.

Good, common sense source of information

This book presented the topic of funding a retirement in a positive and "fun to read" way. I found the information very useful for planning for the future. I have read many articles and publications on the topic and this is one of the better presentations. I recommend this book as a solid source for helping develop a retirement strategy, especially for late starters.

Logical and Straight Forward - Best Retirement Book I Have Read

Well written book. I'm not a financial planner but I walked away believing these guys came as close to laying out a template for a good plan as any financial planner I have ever met with. I'm going to buy copies for my children - like Ben says, "If you are old enough to have sex, you are old enough to plan for your retirement" (maybe I did not get that quote exactly right - but close enough!!)

Great information and resources for getting a handle on financing your retirement

Ben Stein and Phil DeMuth have done us a real favor by speaking the unvarnished truth about what needs to be done by everyone who will face retirement. They have provided a clear and sensible approach that can be easily adapted whether you are planning on retirement in five years or in fifty. Obviously, the more time you have until retirement, the better you can prepare. What I particularly like about the approach taken here is that it doesn't pretend that if everyone followed their advice that society would be rid of the problem of the Baby Boomers moving into their retirement decades (nowadays, retirement lasts much longer than most of us realize). This is a book for YOU. As the authors admit, the idea that everyone will follow the advice offered in this book is roughly nil. However, it is a book about each of us taking responsibility for our own future and rescuing our elderly self. I like the notion the authors put forward about our common fantasy of wishing we could help our younger self do better with what we have learned in life. However, the past cannot be changed. We do have ability to help our future self live better if we will take the proper steps now. When Stein and DeMuth say, "now", they mean today, not sometime when you finally have extra money to sock away. Somehow that time of future affluence never seems to materialize by itself. Stein and DeMuth take away all our comforting delusions about Social Security and the inevitable choices the government will have to make someday. In all their calculations they also warn us about tax assumptions that can change as future politicians need access to our savings and wealth to fund their programs. The overall point of their warnings is that you need to prepare for your future as if you had to pay for it by yourself. They help us think through our home, different kinds of investments to store our savings (and hopefully earn some more as well), thinking carefully about how and where we live, how long we should (need to) work, how to keep earning during retirement, and urge us to realize that any pain we think we would incur with the level of savings needed to fund our retirement will not go away if delayed. It will simply be pain that will be saved and collect interest and will make our future self more impoverished and miserable than he needed to be. There are many worksheets so we can learn the principles by thinking carefully about our own situation. The book also has some helpful principles that are easy to commit to memory. I also liked the section of the book that takes us from our teenage years to retirement and what we should be accomplishing financially during those years. The way Stein and DeMuth focus on doing prudent things with an emphasis on steady behavior, low cost investing, with rebalancing every five years (so you don't spend too much rebalancing every year, or finding your portfolio seriously out of whack current market realities), and taking as