Spend 'Til the End


Book Description

Rich or poor, young or old, high school or college grad, this book, written by economist Laurence J. Kotlikoff and syndicated financial columnist Scott Burns, can change your life for the better! If you follow the advice in this book, it will raise your living standard (possibly by a lot), improve your lifestyle, and help you spend 'til the end. And it will completely transform your financial thinking, turning every bit of conventional financial wisdom on its head. If this sounds like a revolution in financial planning, you got it. So do The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Time, Consumer Reports, and other top publications that have been featuring the authors' economics-based "consumption smoothing" approach to financial planning. Spend 'Til the End substitutes economic wisdom for the "rules of dumb" that currently pass for financial advice. In the process it indicts the investment and financial-planning industry for giving most people saving and insurance targets that are much too high and then convincing them to invest in risky mutual funds and expensive insurance policies. The result is that most people are scrimping and saving during the years when they could be spending and enjoying their money -- and with no sure payoff. Easy to read, this book is packed with practical and often shocking advice on whether to work, how to pick a career, which job to take, where to live, what sort of house to buy, how much to save, when to retire, which kind of retirement account to use, whether to have kids, whether to divorce, when to take Social Security, how fast to spend down your assets in retirement, and how to invest.




Money Magic


Book Description

Increase your spending power, enhance your standard of living, and achieve financial independence with this “must-read” guide to money management (Jane Bryant Quinn). Laurence Kotlikoff, one of our nation’s premier personal finance experts and coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Get What’s Yours: The Secrets to Maxing Out Your Social Security, harnesses the power of economics and advanced computation to deliver a host of spellbinding but simple money magic tricks that will transform your financial future.Each trick shares a basic ingredient for financial savvy based on economic common sense, not Wall Street snake oil. Money Magic offers a clear path to a richer, happier, and safer financial life. Whether you’re making education, career, marriage, lifestyle, housing, investment, retirement, or Social Security decisions, Kotlikoff provides a clear framework for readers of all ages and income levels to learn tricks like: How to choose a career to maximize your lifetime earnings (hint: you may want to consider picking up a plunger instead of a stethoscope). How to buy a superior education on the cheap and graduate debt-free. Why it’s smarter to cash out your IRA to pay off your mortgage. Why delaying retirement for two years can reap dividends and how to lower your average lifetime tax bracket. Money Magic’s most powerful act is transforming your financial thinking, explaining not just what to do, but why to do it. Get ready to discover the economics approach to financial planning—the fruit of a century’s worth of research by thousands of cloistered economic wizards whose now-accessible collective findings turn conventional financial advice on its head. Kotlikoff uses his soft heart, hard nose, dry wit, and flashing wand to cast a powerful spell, leaving you eager to accomplish what you formerly dreaded: financial planning.




Die with Zero


Book Description

"A startling new philosophy and practical guide to getting the most out of your money-and out of life-for those who value memorable experiences as much as their earnings"--




The Coming Generational Storm


Book Description

AS URGENT AS EVER: Nonpartisan policy recommendations and personal strategies for protecting against skyrocketing tax rates, reduced benefits, high inflation, and ruined currency. “Lays out in easy-to-understand prose why Social Security and Medicare need a comprehensive overhaul.” —Los Angeles Times In 2030, as 77 million baby boomers hobble into old age, walkers will outnumber strollers; there will be twice as many retirees as there are today but only 18% more workers. How will America handle this demographic overload? How will Social Security and Medicare function with fewer working taxpayers to support these programs? According to Laurence Kotlikoff and Scott Burns, we’ll see skyrocketing tax rates, drastically lower retirement and health benefits, high inflation, a rapidly depreciating dollar, unemployment, and political instability. But to solve a problem you must first understand it. Kotlikoff and Burns take us on a guided tour of our generational imbalance, first introducing us to the baby boomers and the “fiscal child abuse” that will double the taxes paid by the next generation. There’s also the “deficit delusion” of the under-reported national debt. None of this will be solved by any of the popularly touted remedies: cutting taxes, technological progress, immigration, foreign investment, or the elimination of wasteful government spending. So, how can the United States avoid this demographic/fiscal collision? Kotlikoff and Burns propose bold new policies, including meaningful reforms of Social Security and Medicare. Their proposals are simple, straightforward, and geared to attract support from both political parties. Kotlikoff and Burns also offer a “life jacket”—guidelines for individuals to protect their financial health and retirement. This paperback edition has been revised and updated and includes a new foreword by the authors.




The Essential Retirement Guide


Book Description

Retirement 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: Saving 10 percent a year is not a bad rule of thumb if you could follow it, but there will be times when you cannot do so and it might not even be advisable to try. Most people never spend more than 50 percent of their gross income on themselves before retirement; hence their retirement income target is usually much less than 70 percent. Interest rates will almost certainly stay low for the next 20 years, which will affect how much you need to save. Even in this low-interest environment, you can withdraw 5 percent or more of your retirement savings each year in retirement without running out of money. Your spending in retirement will almost certainly decline at a certain age so you may not need to save quite as much as you think. As people reach the later stages of retirement, they become less capable of managing their finances, even though they grow more confident of their ability to do so! Plan for this before it is too late. Annuities have become very expensive, but they still make sense for a host of reasons. 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.




Get What's Yours


Book Description

Learn the secrets to maximizing your Social Security benefits and earn up to thousands of dollars more each year with expert advice that you can't get anywhere else. Want to know how to navigate the forbidding maze of Social Security and emerge with the highest possible benefits? You could try reading all 2,728 rules of the Social Security system (and the thousands of explanations of these rules), but Kotlikoff, Moeller, and Solman explain Social Security benefits in an easy to understand and user-friendly style. What you don't know can seriously hurt you: wrong decisions about which Social Security benefits to apply for cost some individual retirees tens of thousands of dollars in lost income every year. How many retirees or those nearing retirement know about such Social Security options as file and suspend (apply for benefits and then don't take them)? Or start stop start (start benefits, stop them, then re-start them)? Or-just as important-when and how to use these techniques? Get What's Yours covers the most frequent benefit scenarios faced by married retired couples, by divorced retirees, by widows and widowers, among others. It explains what to do if you're a retired parent of dependent children, disabled, or an eligible beneficiary who continues to work, and how to plan wisely before retirement. It addresses the tax consequences of your choices, as well as the financial implications for other investments. Many personal finance books briefly address Social Security, but none offers the thorough, authoritative, yet conversational analysis found here. You've paid all your working life for these benefits. Now, get what's yours.




Sometimes I Lie


Book Description

ALICE FEENEYS NEW YORK TIMES AND INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER “Boldly plotted, tightly knotted—a provocative true-or-false thriller that deepens and darkens to its ink-black finale. Marvelous.” —AJ Finn, author of The Woman in the Window My name is Amber Reynolds. There are three things you should know about me: 1. I’m in a coma. 2. My husband doesn’t love me anymore. 3. Sometimes I lie. Amber wakes up in a hospital. She can’t move. She can’t speak. She can’t open her eyes. She can hear everyone around her, but they have no idea. Amber doesn’t remember what happened, but she has a suspicion her husband had something to do with it. Alternating between her paralyzed present, the week before her accident, and a series of childhood diaries from twenty years ago, this brilliant psychological thriller asks: Is something really a lie if you believe it's the truth?




The Clash of Generations


Book Description

How America went bankrupt and how we can save ourselves—as a country and as individuals—from economic disaster. The United States is bankrupt, flat broke. Thanks to accounting that would make Enron blush, America's insolvency goes far beyond what our leaders are disclosing. The United States is a fiscal basket case, in worse shape than the notoriously bailed-out countries of Greece, Ireland, and others. How did this happen? InThe Clash of Generations, experts Laurence Kotlikoff and Scott Burns document our six-decade, off-balance-sheet, unsustainable financing scheme. They explain how we have balanced our longer lives on the backs of our (relatively few) children. At the same time, we've been on a consumption spree, saving and investing less than nothing. And that's not to mention the evisceration of the middle class and a financial system that has proven it can't be trusted. Kotlikoff and Burns outline grassroots strategies for saving ourselves—and especially our children—from what could be a truly catastrophic financial collapse. Kotlikoff and Burns sounded the alarm in their widely acclaimedThe Coming Generational Storm, but politicians didn't listen. Now the need for action is even more urgent. It's up to us to demand radical reform of our tax system, our healthcare system, and our Social Security system, and to insist on better paths to investment return than those provided by Wall Street (mis)managers. Kotlikoff and Burns's "Purple Plans" (so called because they will appeal to both Republicans and Democrats) have been endorsed by a who's who of economists and offer a new way forward; and their revolutionary investment strategy for individuals replaces the idea of financial capital with "life decision capital." Of course, we won't be doing all this just for ourselves. We need to fix America's fiscal mess before our kids inherit it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMKw76lBn0k&feature=youtube_gdata_player




Till the End


Book Description

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A raw, compelling memoir of baseball, family, fame, addiction, and recovery, by one of the most beloved baseball players of his generation “Beautifully rendered . . . Readers and fans will be rooting for him to enter the Hall of Fame and rooting even harder for him to stay sober.”—The Wall Street Journal How does it feel to be born with enormous gifts, in a life shadowed by tragedy? What does it mean when the gift that opens the world for us is not enough to stop us from losing the things we love? And what new gifts do we find in that loss? Baseball had been CC Sabathia’s life since he was a kid in gritty, baseball-obsessed Vallejo, California. He was a star by the time he was a preteen and a professional athlete when he was still a teenager. Everything he knew about how to be a person—an adult, a husband and father, a leader—he learned in rhythm with the baseball season, the every-fifth-day high-intensity spotlight of a starting pitcher, all while dealing with one of the sport’s most turbulent eras: racism in a sport with diminishing Black presence; the era of performance-enhancing drugs; and the increasing tension between high-value contracts and sports owners who moved players around like game pieces. But his biggest struggle was with his own body and mind: Buoyed his whole life by talent and a fiery competitive spirit, CC found himself dealing with the steady and eventually alarming breakdown of his own body and his growing addiction in a world that encouraged and enabled it. Till the End is the thrilling memoir of one of the most beloved players in the game, a veteran star of the sport’s marquee team during its latest championship era. It’s also a book about baseball—about the ins and outs of its most important and technical position and its evolution in this volatile era. But woven within it is the moving, universal story of resilience and mortality and discovering what matters.




Generational Accounting


Book Description

In an effort to bring all generations to an understanding of the American economy, Laurence Kotlikoff shares information of the budget deficit of the United States government. Generational Accounting strives to educate readers on how the economy of the United States American functions, from explaining who pays for the goods and services the nation receives to when it must be paid, and just how much money goes to it. Kotlikoff analyzes how the government’s budget deficit is the cornerstone of conventional economic policy and argues that it is a number devoid of economic content, often used to lead the American people astray. “Read it and you’ll be on the cutting edge of future debates on fiscal policy.” – Fortune