How to Retire with Enough Money
Book

How to Retire with Enough Money

And How to Know What Enough Is

Teresa Ghilarducci Ph.D
Workman Publishing, 2015

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8

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Recommendation

Most Americans do not prepare for retirement. To give them a hand, retirement planning expert and New School of Social Research economics professor Teresa Ghilarducci offers a no-nonsense look at the critical elements that influence the quality of your retirement – earnings, investments, health care, and more. She presents hard-nosed financial realities that may scare the unprepared. Though her medicine may taste bitter, Ghilarducci believes failing to take immediate action will guarantee an unpleasant retirement. While never giving investment advice, getAbstract recommends her practical, short, comprehensive manual to everyone who has to work and who one day hopes to stop.

Summary

“Facing the Facts”

Many people are fearful about being able to afford retirement. Even those with pensions, paid-for houses and Social Security benefits are apprehensive. Though individual responsibility is an integral part of retirement planning, the problem of not having enough money goes beyond personal accountability. Most future retirees face an economic climate hostile to their situation.

For decades, Americans depended on traditional pension plans that guaranteed specific retirement payouts. Employees contributed an exact dollar amount from each paycheck – in some cases, employers funded the entire amount – and their companies placed the money in a professionally managed fund. Having pension fund payouts plus Social Security benefits enabled many people to live comfortably in retirement with a minimum of stress.

But in the late 1970s, an accountant discovered a loophole – subsection 401k – in the tax code that eventually led the IRS to approve a new type of retirement fund. Though this provision originally was intended to cover the unique demands of highly paid executives who wanted to avoid paying taxes on deferred income, companies tried selling the ...

About the Author

Teresa Ghilarducci is the Bernard L. and Irene Schwartz professor of economics at the New School for Social Research. She also wrote When I’m Sixty-Four: The Plot Against Pensions and the Plan to Save Them and Labor’s Capital: The Politics and Economics for Private Pensions.

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