Plan Your Prosperity: The Only Retirement Guide You'll Ever Need, Starting Now--Whether You're 22, 52 or 82

by Kenneth L. Fisher

Whether you’re in retirement, just getting ready to retire, or 5, 10, or 40 years out, this book can help you invest smarter your whole life and yes, plan better for retirement.  Harmful mythology abounds about retirement investing . Many retirees or soon-to-be retirees have heard a plethora of advice. Take 100 (or 120) and subtract your age to get your equity allocation, put the rest in bonds or cash. Buy only bonds. Buy only high dividend stocks. Or some combination! Buy equity-indexed annuities or some “guaranteed” income product. All examples of a potentially harmful myth many folks believe to be smart, strategic moves.  Investors believe preparing for retirement requires a radically different set of tools or a dizzying array of products. Navigating the world of retirement products and services can be a full-time job. But investing for retirement is, in practice, not much (if at all) different from investing. In Your Retirement Plan , Ken Fisher will give readers a workable strategy to either develop their own retirement investing plan or work more successfully with a professional to increase the likelihood of achieving long-term goals while avoiding common pitfalls. The book will include easy-to-follow steps like  In this retirement planning book that's not just for retirees, Fisher will hand readers the tools and confidence they need to better plan for the future.

Genres: Finance, Nonfiction

192 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Kat Main · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good guide for a beginning investor with capital. If you don’t have a hold of your finances, I wouldn’t recommend this as your first and would instead reach first for a book on how to manage your cash flow. If you are already well versed in investing, this book won’t provide much if anything additional to what you already know. The formulas and spreadsheets are flourishing throughout the book, filler for some and useful for others. My takeaway is basically reinforcement of what I already knew or from other, more recently written books.

[Nate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fisher presents an overview of how to structure your investments and create a benchmark to determine what strategy is best for achieving your financial goals. He addresses some basic personal finance aspects such as understanding net worth through personal assets owned and personal liabilities, but by far the majority of the book is based on educating readers how to think about their investments and how to manage the emotional aspect of human behavior that often is the enemy to good investing. He argues that investing is hard, not technically, in the way learning how to do matrix algebra might be, but in the sense that we need to create a plan and follow that plan even when the emotions of watching the stock drop might make us fearful and want to sell and pull our money so we don't "lose" more. That's the hard part, managing the emotions of loss and adjusting for that. Fisher does a great job explaining the basics, presenting complex ideas in a straightforward manner, and talking about the fact that there is no one guaranteed plan to financial success. He emphasizes that each individual is different and has different goals and desires and this will all play in to how they choose to save and invest their money. He is a fan of getting professional financial advice, but he doesn't seem to care whether your portfolio is self-directed, or with a professional advisor. I like his frank, down-to-earth approach to discussing these items and while parts of it might be viewed as technical with a few compounding equations, they're basic things that people should know and understand, even if it's hard. This isn't the book I'd recommend for someone just starting their path to taking control of their personal finances, but I would definitely recommend this to someone who is well on that journey and beginning to invest.

[Vaughan · Rating 2 out of 5]

The chapter sumaries included in the book highlight how little real content there is. The book is padded out with mathematical models and examples that would be better delivered as a shared Google spreadsheet - allowing people to input their own data and see the models at work.

All in all there are better, more comprehensive retirement guides... so this one does not live up to it's title.

[Christian Crowley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I appreciate the straightforward approach, though it could have had l fewer silly or snarky asides. This was a quick read for me; I finished reading through most of it in about 5 hours (while I was supposed to be doing my taxes).

In summary:
* figure out what cash flow you'll want in retirement
* Determine how much of this will come from "distributions" from your investment portfolio (given other sources of retirement income)
* Choose the percentage of your portfolio this distribution represents (consider Monte Carlo analysis to gauge how long your portfolio could sustain these distributions)
* Calculate the required size is your portfolio and what you need to save to get there
* choose a "benchmark" to model your portfolio on (like the S&P500 for US stocks, or better still the MSCI for global stocks) based on your time horizon (lifespan), return expectations (or whether you're trying to grow or preserve value), and cash-flow needs (lifestyle expenses minus other income)

* Reassess your goals and benchmarking once a year

I would have liked to see more on
* choosing the size of your annual "distribution" from your portfolio (presumably that's a combination of dividends and asset sales), and
* thinking about your portfolio balance towards the end of your planning-horizon. That is, should aim to run the balance down close to zero?

The Monte Carlo simulations were helpful illustrations, indicating that taking a 3% annual distribution from an all-stocks portfolio should be sustainable for at least 20 years, and in half the model-runs the portfolio lasted at least 30 years. At higher distributions the portfolio is depleted sooner in the shortest and median cases:
* 3%: 20 years; 30 years
* 5%: 12 years; 28 years
* 7%: 9 years; 24 years
* 10%: 6 years; 18 years

[Tadas Talaikis · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Plan your prosperity" title is somewhat misleading, because not everyone are making over 100k a year, although it is written from such perspective. For all others, you cannot "prosper" if you don't take (high and much more active than this book presents) risks.

[Curtis Rother · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solid retirement book that teaches a conceptual framework for developing a personalized plan. Importantly, Ken teaches that there are no good rules of thumb or shortcuts. The only solution to knowing what you are doing is to think for yourself. As always, Ken adds wit and humor to these pages.

[Susan Visser · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a great refresher for me. I read "Wealthy Barber" before my career started and followed the guidance pretty closely.

The book was well written and easy to follow. Very short, but very important. If you don't have a financial plan in place yet, it's a good one to read.

[Andrew Hodgson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good quick survey. Useful practical info. Depressing as a middle classish person in the millennial generation. I don’t even make as much money as I am supposed to be saving each year to become a millionaire by retirement age.

[Jana · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little tedious to get through

[Roland Martinez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty decent retirement planning book with some good worksheets for gathering your information together.

[Keisha Adams · Rating 2 out of 5]

Take a shot every time you read “benchmark”

Dates itself with opening chapter saying eggs are cheap. Cries in 6$dozen for the cheapest hormone fed caged birds.

Manages to repeat the basics of investing in the most complex and condescending way possible. At least it was only 150pages. Over with quickly.

[Anthony Cheng · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book doesn't deliver on the premise of its title, a cardinal sin for nonfiction as far as I'm concerned. Aside from some generic advice about setting your retirement benchmarks based on your risk tolerance and individual goals, I couldn't find any 'plan to prosperity' or 'retirement guide' in here. The author finds time to make political jabs about small government though. Take a look at Tony Robbins's MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom for a more comprehensive book about money.

[Colin Price · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some good tips if you are an active investor. I, however, am a passive investor (something he does applaud if it can be done right), so much of the talk of choosing the right benchmark and sticking with it does not apply as a passive strategy is usually built solely on index selection. Still, there was enough other stuff to make it worth my while.

[Abhi Singal · Rating 2 out of 5]

Easy read.. The charts and graphs in the book were well done. Appendix A is insightful. Although written by an esteemed author, I found the book lacking. This is a beginner's guide to personal finance with an inadequate discussion of risk as it applies to investing. Check out Suze Orman and Dave Ramsey to supplement.

[Ken Weiner · Rating 3 out of 5]

My dad recommended this to me. It made me think about whether I should get rid of my financial advisor and move my money into a simple index fund like the S&P 500 or MSCI

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book to be written in plain language, which I like, but the mid section was a little complex. The end and back end was plainfully written with an easy to read Appendix.