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Living More with Less
by Doris Janzen LongacreWhat we have needed are good concrete models [of simple living]. This book fills that vacuum. Practical, workable models are here by the score. Nor are they theoretical models conceived by ivory-tower academicians. They are the personal testimonies of ordinary people all over the world who have begun the pilgrimage toward simplicity.
Smart Couples Finish Rich
by David BachUpdated and revised for a new generation of couples, David Bach's classic money guide teaches couples how to build stable financial wealth that lasts.
David Bach, nationally renowned financial adviser and author of the bestselling Smart Women Finish Rich, knows that it doesn't have to be this way. After years of first-hand experience working with couples young and old, David Bach reveals that through communication and partnership, planning your finances together can be both fun and easy when you have the right tools. In Smart Couples Finish Rich, Expanded and Updated, David Bach offers couples a step-by-step guide to building and maintaining financial wealth that has been tailored to fit our current economy, but will last for years to come. Instead of avoiding each other when it comes time to balance the checkbook, you and your partner will learn how to come together and identify your core values and dreams, creating a spending and saving plan that reflects your values as a couple.
Packed with easy-to-use tools that will take you from credit-card management to long-term care, each chapter will guide you and your partner as a team toward a more rewarding financial plan based on the same overall financial objectives. The Smart Couples Finish Rich nine-step journey provides every couple with strategies for organization, communication, and smarter spending that you can put into action immediately.
This journey reveals:
A book for couples of all ages and all tax brackets, Smart Couples Finish Rich is the ultimate guide for creating a lifetime of wealth--both personal and financial.
Get What's Yours for Medicare
by Philip MoellerA coauthor of the New York Times bestselling guide to Social Security Get What’s Yours authors an essential companion to explain Medicare, the nation’s other major benefit for older Americans. Learn how to maximize your health coverage and save money.
Social Security provides the bulk of most retirees’ income and Medicare guarantees them affordable health insurance. But few people know what Medicare covers and what it doesn’t, what it costs, and when to sign up. Nor do they understand which parts of Medicare are provided by the government and how these work with private insurance plans—Medicare Advantage, drug insurance, and Medicare supplement insurance.
Do you understand Medicare’s parts A, B, C, D? Which Part D drug plan is right and how do you decide? Which is better, Medigap or Medicare Advantage? What do you do if Medicare denies payment for a procedure that your doctor says you need? How do you navigate the appeals process for denied claims? If you’re still working or have a retiree health plan, how do those benefits work with Medicare? Do you know about the annual enrollment period for Medicare, or about lifetime penalties for late enrollment, or any number of other key Medicare rules?
Health costs are the biggest unknown expense for older Americans, who are turning sixty-five at the rate of 10,000 a day. Understanding and navigating Medicare is the best way to save health care dollars and use them wisely. In Get What’s Yours for Medicare, retirement expert Philip Moeller explains how to understand all these important choices and make the right decisions for your health and wealth now—and for the future.
Get What's Yours
by Laurence J. Kotlikoff and Philip Moeller and Paul SolmanGet What’s Yours has proven itself to be the definitive book about how to navigate the forbidding maze of Social Security and emerge with the highest possible benefits. It is an engaging manual of tactics and strategies written by well-known financial commentators that is unobtainable elsewhere. You could try reading all 2,728 rules of the Social Security system (and the thousands of explanations of these rules), but academia’s Kotlikoff, the popular press’s Moeller, and public television’s Solman explain the Social Security system just as comprehensively, and a lot more comprehensibly. Moreover, they demonstrate that what you don’t know can seriously hurt you: wrong decisions about which Social Security benefits to apply for cost individual retirees tens of thousands of dollars in lost income every year. (Some of those people are even in the book.)
Changes to Social Security that take effect in 2016 make it more important than ever to wait as long as possible (until age 70, if possible) to claim Social Security benefits. The new law also has significant implications for those who wish to claim divorced spousal benefits (and how many Social Security recipients even know about divorced spousal benefits?). Besides addressing these and other issues, this revised edition contains a chapter explaining how Medicare rules can shape Social Security decisions.
Many other personal-finance books briefly address Social Security, but none offers the full, authoritative, yet conversational analysis of Get What’s Yours.
Get What’s Yours explains Social Security benefits through basic strategies and stirring stories. It covers the most frequent benefit scenarios faced by married retired couples; by divorced retirees; by widows and widowers. It explains what to do if you’re a retired parent of dependent children; disabled; an eligible beneficiary who continues to work. It addresses the tax consequences of your choices, as well as the financial implications for other investments. It does all this and more.
There are more than 52 million Americans aged 54 to 69. Ten thousand of them reach Social Security’s full retirement age of 66 every day. For all these people—and for their families and friends—Get What’s Yours has proven to be an invaluable, and therefore indispensable, tool.
The 5 Years Before You Retire
by Emily Guy BirkenA comprehensive guide to planning your retirement before it's too late!
Even though half of all Americans put money aside for retirement, it isn't until they reach their sixties that many realize that they haven't saved enough. With The Five Years Before You Retire, you'll hone in on what you need to do in the next five years to maximize your current savings and create a realistic plan for your future. This book guides you through each financial, medical, and familial decision, from taking advantage of the employer match your company offers for your 401k program to enrolling in Medicare to discussing housing options with your family. Covering every aspect of retirement planning, these straightforward strategies explain in detail how you can make the most of your last few years in the workforce and prepare for the future you've always wanted.
Whether you just started devising a plan or have been saving since your first job, The Five Years Before You Retire will show you what you need to do now to ensure that you live comfortably for years to come.
Pensionless
by Emily BrandonGet the most out of your retirement!
If you're one of the millions of Americans without a pension plan, your retirement years might seem like a huge financial question mark. Pensionless, by U.S. News Senior Editor for Retirement Emily Brandon, addresses the retirement benefits that are available to you, how to use them correctly, and how to avoid potential pitfalls. Learn how to avoid surcharges on your Medicare benefits, how to increase Social Security and employer-sponsored benefits to help pay for retirement, and how to minimize costs and boost the value of your existing retirement benefits. And you'll learn how to tweak your lifestyle now so that you can live well in retirement without the security of a pension.
Inside you'll find ideas on how to get more Social Security by claiming benefits twice, ways to minimize fees and avoid penalties on retirement accounts, and how to inflate 401(k) balances. Featuring an analysis of the significant changes made to Social Security in the recent federal budget, Pensionless will help you enjoy those retirement years you've worked so hard for.
You Can Retire Early!
by Deacon HayesThe definitive guide to financial independence at any age! Retiring early is not limited to lottery winners or the super rich. In fact, with proper planning, we can all retire at a younger age than we ever dreamed—but only with the right plan.
Personal finance expert Deacon Hayes explains the practical, concrete steps you can take to start your retirement when you’re young enough to thoroughly enjoy it, including:
With Hayes’s guidance, you can achieve financial independence and enjoy an active, happy, and long retirement.
The Essential Retirement Guide
by Frederick VetteseRetirement planning is difficult enough without having to contend with misinformation. Unfortunately, much of the advice that is dispensed is either unsubstantiated or betrays a strong vested interest. In The Essential Retirement Guide, Frederick Vettese analyses the most fundamental questions of retirement planning and offers some startling insights. The book finds, for example that:
In addition, The Essential Retirement Guide shows how you can estimate your own lifespan and helps you to understand the financial implications of long-term care. Most importantly, it reveals how you can calculate your personal wealth target - the amount of money you will need by the time you retire to live comfortably. The author uses his actuarial expertise to substantiate his findings but does so in a jargon-free way.
Retirement Fail
by Greg SullivanEvery day, people just like you, people who have worked hard and saved carefully for retirement, make decisions that will eventually crack their nest egg. Just because you added to your 401(k) or IRA plan every year, invested wisely, and amassed significant savings, you are not necessarily home free. Ready or not, your decisions all along the retirement path can positively or negatively affect your financial future.
In Retirement Fail, top financial adviser Greg Sullivan shares the insights he has gained over his thirty-five-year career in wealth management to help you identify potential pitfalls and learn how to safeguard your hard-earned retirement assets. Because, contrary to what most people think, it is not poor portfolio performance that usually busts your retirement accounts. Rather, it’s the emotional decisions you make that can cause major problems. Whether it’s buying a vacation home that is beyond your reach, subsidizing your adult kids to a degree that is ill advised, or passing on the umbrella insurance your advisor recommended, the choices you make have an enormous effect on whether you’ll be able to enjoy the comfortable retirement you’ve dreamed about.
Retirement Fail:
The numerical side of financial planning is one thing—the far more difficult task is looking at the way the decisions we make impact our own future and those around us. Whether you are working with a financial advisor or are going it alone, Retirement Fail shows you the points you need to pay attention to and helps you figure out what your priorities are—and what tradeoffs you may have to make in order to achieve them.
IRAs, 401(k)s & Other Retirement Plans
by John C. Suttle and Twila SlesnickIf you have a retirement plan, IRAs, 401(k)s & Other Retirement Plans is your comprehensive guide to taking money out of it. Make sense of the complex tax rules governing when you can — and when you need to — take money out of your plan, and how much you can take out. Most importantly, avoid the penalties that many folks have to pay because they don't take their required minimum distributions.
In plain English, this book covers the most common retirement plans, including 401(k)s, IRAs, profit-sharing plans, Keoghs, pensions, and tax-deferred annuities. It helps you answer these questions:
Completely updated, IRAs, 401(k)s & Other Retirement Plans provides clear examples to guide you through the decision-making process and making calculations. Samples of tax forms required by the IRS are also included, as well as easy-to-follow instructions on completing them.
How Do I Get There from Here?
by George H. SchofieldNo matter how far or close you think you are to retirement, this book is your one-stop guide to help you plot your direction for the coming decades.Not long ago everyone knew what the word retirement meant--retire at age 65 after 40 years at the same job and coast through your golden years courtesy of a comfortable nest egg. But now, age expectancy is higher, savings are slimmer, and people change jobs more frequently. Clinging to this outdated concept of retirement only gets you a room in your kids&’ house. Your retirement is going to require an incremental approach to planning--and you must begin now. This requires conscious engagement, diverse interests, and the ability to adapt.In How Do I Get There from Here?, readers will first be directed how to review all their assets--both tangible and intangible--so they can get an honest assessment of where they are right now. Then a journey through self-reflective questions and exercises will:walk you through imagining your future,identifying skills you&’ll need,and learning how to prepare for inevitable twists and turns along the way.Stop clinging to an ancient and stereotypical idea of retirement. Decades of nonstop leisure is not only unreachable for most, it&’s not even truly desirable. Begin now charting the path for a unique, dynamic future you can look forward to!
Retirement Reinvention
by Robin RyanFor twenty years, Robin Ryan has been helping clients get the most out of their careers and their lives. Now, in Retirement Reinvention, she shatters the myths of retirement. The old model of retirement is changing. The majority of retirees today are seeking fun and meaningful ways to spend their time.
Full of practical advice, this thought-provoking guide offers readers a path for reinventing their own retirements, including step-by-step instructions for:
From starting a dream business to shifting to the nonprofit sector to volunteering, Robin Ryan will help you create a plan and pivot toward a future as vital as it is truly rewarding.
Social Security, Medicare and Government Pensions
by Joseph MatthewsYour complete guide to Social Security retirement and medical benefits.
The rules for claiming Social Security have changed. Find out if you still qualify to file and suspend benefits or to choose between your own benefits and spousal benefits before these strategies disappear. Learn this and more with Social Security, Medicare & Government Pensions--completely updated for 2018.
Retire on Real Estate
by K. Kai Anderson and Amanda HanThink beyond the nest egg . . .Do you know how you’ll fund your retirement? With pensions slashed, savings slim, and Social Security insufficient and unpredictable, most people won’t have nearly enough money to last them.
But a sustainable solution lies in plain sight: rental property. Retire on Real Estate helps anyone, of any age, take advantage of this often overlooked income generator. Written by a seasoned real estate investor and landlord, the book exposes the cracks in most retirement portfolios, opens your eyes to the benefits of rental income, and lays out a complete plan of action, including how to:
Whether you want to diversify with a single property or self-fund your entire retirement, real estate is an investment that pays you back for the rest of your life.
The Power of Zero
by Ed Slott and David McKnightThere's a massive freight train bearing down on the average American investor, and it's coming in the form of higher taxes.
The United States Government has made trillions of dollars in unfunded promises for programs like Social Security and Medicare--and the only way to deliver on these promises is to raise taxes. Some experts have even suggested that tax rates will need to double, just to keep our country solvent. Unfortunately, if you're like most Americans, you've saved the majority of your retirement assets in tax-deferred vehicles like 401(k)s and IRAs. If tax rates go up, how much of your hard-earned money will you really get to keep?
In The Power of Zero, McKnight provides a concise, step-by-step roadmap on how to get to the 0% tax bracket by the time you retire, effectively eliminating tax rate risk from your retirement picture. Now, in this expanded edition, McKnight has updated the book with a new chapter on the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, showing readers how to navigate the new tax law in its first year of being in effect, and how they can extend the life of their retirement savings by taking advantage of it now.
The day of reckoning is fast approaching. Are you ready to do what it takes to experience the power of zero?
Personal Finance For Seniors For Dummies
by Eric Tyson and Robert C. CarlsonAre you nearing (or already basking in) retirement? This helpful guide addresses the unique financial opportunities and challenges you'll face as you enter your golden years.
Personal Finance For Seniors For Dummies empowers you to chart your financial course for the decades to come, guiding you through the basics of creating a budget for retirement, investing accrued assets, taking advantage of governmental and nongovernmental benefits and planning for your family's future. You'll get trusted, practical information on reexamining investment strategies and rebalancing a portfolio, long-term care options, pension plans and social security, health care, Medicare, and prescription drug costs, and so much more.
Personal Finance For Seniors For Dummies is basic enough to help novices get their arms around thorny financial issues, while also challenging advanced readers to identify areas for improvement.
Personal Finance in Your 50s All-in-One For Dummies
by Eric TysonRetirement security is one of the most pressing social issues facing the world in the next 30 years—so if you’re approaching your golden years, it’s essential to have a secure financial future. Personal Finance in Your 50s All-in-One For Dummies provides targeted financial advice and assists soon-to-be or established boomers with making informed decisions about how best to spend, invest, and protect their wealth while planning for the future.
Retirement is an exciting time … but it can also be scary if you’re not sure that you have your ducks in a row. This hands-on resource arms you with an arsenal of beginner to intermediate personal finance and estate planning techniques for everything from spending, saving, navigating insurance, managing medical costs, household expenses, and even employment.
With the help of this all-in-one resource, you’ll get a succinct framework and expert advice to help you make solid decisions and confidently plan for your future.
The 250 Estate Planning Questions Everyone Should Ask
by Lita EpsteinHow can you provide a financially sound future for your loved ones while avoiding estate planning or even making a will, unsure about how to effectively plan for the disposition of your assets?
Estate planning is essential—no matter how much money or property you intend to leave to your heirs. In this handy Q&A guide, you’ll find answers to all of your questions about taxes, gifts, wills, will substitutes, and much more, including:
With this book at your side, you can use the estate and tax laws and options to make sure you’ve made the best allotment of your property. And when you’ve done that, you can face the future with confidence, knowing your heirs and family are provided for.
The ABCs of Getting Out of Debt
by Garrett SuttonIn difficult times, debt can be a matter of life and death, happiness and despair. Controlling your debt can bring order and calm. Mastering debt can bring wealth and success. As bestselling Rich Dad/Poor Dad author Robert Kiyosaki says, “Good debt makes you rich and bad debt makes you poor.”
The ABCs of Getting Out of Debt provides the necessary knowledge to navigate through a very challenging credit environment. A Rich Dad’s Advisor and best selling author of numerous business books, Garrett Sutton, Esq. clearly writes on the key strategies readers must follow to get out of debt. Unlike other superficial offerings, Sutton explores the psychology and health effects of debt. From there, the reader learns how to beat the lenders at their own game, and how to understand and repair your own credit. Using real life illustrative stories, Sutton shares how to deal with debt collectors, avoid credit scams, and win with good credit.
The Everything Improve Your Credit Book
by Justin PritchardDo you know your credit score? Do you know how to improve it? The Everything Improve Your Credit Book teaches you about the importance of good credit and how it affects your life. Author Justin Pritchard, M.B.A., the About.com Guide to Banking and Loans, demystifies the often intimidating world of credit, with practical guidance on how to improve credit history and increase your credit score.
With tips on avoiding common mistakes that reduce credit scores and ways to improve bad credit, this easy-to-use guide provides you with valuable information on:
Packed with sensible, real-world advice, The Everything Improve Your Credit Book helps you to take control of your finances, save money, and build enough good credit for a lifetime!
Improve and Increase Your Credit Score
by Jason R. RichBestselling author Jason R. Rich joins forces with top credit experts and delivers an insider’s guide to credit. Revealing jaw-dropping secrets, strategies and tools, Rich and his team of industry insiders show consumers how to get out from under any credit crunch, and get back in control of their financial future.
Reveals how to increase a credit score, remove incorrect and negative information from credit reports, rebuild destroyed credit, and ultimately, save hundreds, possibly thousands, of dollars every month!
Includes worksheets, exclusive interviews with credit experts and supplemental resources.
Debt-Free Forever
by Gail Vaz-OxladeIf you’re afraid to open your bills, if you’ve never added up how much you owe, if you can’t even imagine being debt-free, it’s time to join the thousands of people Gail Vaz-Oxlade has helped. Her straightforward approach to money management is based on self-control, hard work, and prioritizing what’s really important. Debt-Free Forever is Gail’s step-by-step guide, and she’ll show you how to:
Make no mistake: Getting out of debt isn’t easy. But in Debt-Free Forever, Gail gives you a clear strategy and the steps needed to implement it. So if you’re finished with excuses, overdue notices, and maxed-out credit cards, pick up this book, follow Gail’s plan, and start becoming debt-free forever.
Debt Free For Life
by David BachThe #1 bestselling author presents his most important book since The Automatic Millionaire and gives Canadians the knowledge, the tools, and the mindset to get out of debt — forever.
Whether you are working off student loans or trying to meet the minimum balance on your credit card bill, you are probably worried every time you open your mailbox. With salaries frozen and layoffs looming, how will you ever be able to pay down that debt, let alone retire in peace?
Here, David Bach offers a new philosophy made for our times, a paradigm-shifting approach to finance that teaches you how to pay down your debt and adopt a whole new way of living. If you have debt, you can be rich but still not free. When you pay down your debt, you reach Freedom Day, that glorious moment when you need a lot less money just to live. On that day, you are truly free. You can have a smaller nest egg and still retire, perhaps even earlier than you expected.
With his trademark motivational energy and take-action step by step advice, Bach helps you revolutionize your finances. In these lean times, it's still possible to live your financial dreams. Let David Bach show you how.
Project Debt Free
by Frederick O. TowlesProject Debt Free explains the culture of debt in America, highlights the reason for your money troubles, and provides a realistic plan for successfully becoming debt free. While this plan will not get you out of debt overnight, it outlines steps to put you on the road to debt freedom - and keep you on that road.
The Debt-Free Spending Plan
by Joanneh NaglerAnyone suffering under the crushing weight of debt knows how impossible it can seem to find a way out. It's overwhelming - and the more complicated the proposed solution, the harder it is to stick with it. That's why The Debt-Free Spending Plan is SIMPLE. It doesn't require sifting through chapters of high-minded financial advice or digging up your past spending history. It assumes you need help RIGHT NOW, and gives it to you.
You will learn to:
The plan is clear, easy, and takes just five minutes a day - and it doesn't matter if you make $14,000 or $14 million. With straightforward daily spending strategies and effortless expense tracking tools, you will soon find yourself on the road to financial freedom - all before the next billing cycle.