What are the secrets to a healthy, happy, and wealthy retirement?
To answer that question, longtime Morningstar columnist and podcaster Christine Benz asked 20 retirement thought leaders to go deep on a single lesson that they believe contributes to success in retirement.
These lessons range from nitty gritty financial matters to quality-of-life considerations that help pre-retirees and retirees maximize their "time on earth" allocations.
On the financial side of the ledger, the book delves into knowing your retirement income style (Wade Pfau), understanding how your spending might change in retirement (David Blanchett), and organizing your portfolio to support in-retirement cash flows (William Bernstein).
Other interviews probe softer but no less important considerations, such as how to spend in order to optimize happiness (Ramit Sethi), the value of burnishing relationships later in life (Laura Carstensen), and living life so that you have no regrets in the end (Jordan Grumet). These lessons help soon-to-retire and already-retired individuals and their advisors tackle retirement with confidence, wisdom, and a specific plan for maximizing their financial and human capital. Secrets to a healthy, happy, and wealthy retirement Christine Benz is director of personal finance and retirement planning for Morningstar and senior columnist for Morningstar.com. She also co-hosts a podcast for Morningstar, The Long View. She has been widely quoted in the media, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, CNBC, and PBS. Barron's named her to its list of the 100 most influential women in finance in 2020 and 2021, and as one of the 10 most influential women in wealth management in 2021. Benz is author of 30-Minute Money Solutions: A Step-by-Step Guide to Managing Your Finances; co-author of Morningstar® Guide to Mutual Funds: 5-Star Strategies for Success; and author of that book's second edition.
I've been a financial planning practitioner for over 40 years and How to Retire is a home run for investors. It is a unique and exciting book chockfull of important concepts and advice from an amazing list of the "best of the best" brains in the financial planning world. The intellectual capital Christine captured in the book is amazing and every investor will be well
rewarded by owning and reading How to Retire. The financial services industry paints a picture of retirement as walks on the beach and a life of leisure, where the only key to success is accumulating enough dollars to make it happen. In reality, though, retirement is an entirely new phase of life... one that we're often thrust into, with no context on how different it will actually be. In Christine Benz's How to Retire, prospective retirees gain valuable perspective on why the day-to-day experience of life in retirement can be more challenging than anticipated, and how they need to prepare-both financially, and beyond their finances-to ensure they actually find fulfillment in their decades to come! Imagine if you could sit down with the nation's leading experts in every aspect of retirement, tax, and estate planning. Now you can! Christine Benz, a skilled interviewer, has asked all the questions you would have asked, plus the bigger questions you might not have even thought about. The "My takeaways" at the end of each chapter are invaluable. In a series of easily accessible interviews, Christine Benz asks the retirement questions that we are all pondering-and then lays out with clarity and specificity the steps to help answer them. No one is more qualified to guide you through meaningful conversations about how to retire than Christine Benz, and this book is full of them. Treat it like a cheat code for some of the most important financial decisions you will ever make!
