A thoroughly comprehensive and invaluable manual for managing retirement.
Forensic economist Missun presents a detailed guide to money management in retirement.
The author opens his nonfiction debut about retirement planning by noting that many people wish they could be allowed “do-overs” when it comes to personal finance issues. He imagines, for example, that he would advise his 16-year-old self that “investing early and often is essential”—adding, with amusing granularity, that he’d also explain compound interest to his younger self, and “relate the historical results of investing in large US stocks, as measured by Standard and Poor’s 500.” Missun’s goal in these pages is give readers the tools that they need to remove the necessity of do-overs by becoming “better-informed consumers of financial services.” He covers a wide range of financial topics from budgeting to investing to health care and Social Security. His book brings readers through the various stages of retirement planning, starting with accumulating assets and tracking one’s net worth and ending with all the complexities of estate planning. Throughout, Missun balances his financial advice with personal insights; for instance, he writes at length about the behavioral biases that can work against investors: “People invest more often in companies they know,” he says at one point, adding that it’s “one of the several reasons many Americans who invest in stocks own little or no foreign stocks.” He also includes charts and other illustrations to clarify subjects such as health insurance marketplace costs, estimated premium tax credits, Medicare premiums, and bond allocation outcomes.
Missun conveys a lot of specific information in fewer than 250 pages, but the strongest aspect of his book, by far, is its consistently compassionate tone. He never comes across as being solely driven by numbers; rather, his tone is that of a friendly confidante who happens to be very knowledgeable about finance. For example, at one point, he sensitively writes about shifting from paying into retirement accounts to drawing money from them—the true turning point of entering retirement: “Moving from accumulation to withdrawal can be a significant psychological challenge,” he writes, “sometimes causing a loss of self-worth, boredom, and depression.” He also discusses how retirement itself can be difficult to process, at first: “Some people do not realize how much they tie their self-worth to the answer to ‘What do you do?’ during their working years.” This sense of humanity is present throughout his comprehensive work, which tackles an array of complex subjects. They include what to look for when vetting a financial advisor, how to tackle the intricacies of changing one’s state of residence upon retirement, and how to budget for escalating health care costs; the last is a key concern, as most retirees haven’t earned lifetime health benefits from former employers. Also of value is Missun’s consideration of the psychological factors that might prompt someone to retire early, and whether one is always wise to trust those gut feelings. Overall, readers will glean plenty of useful information from this book’s wide-ranging advice.
A thoroughly comprehensive and invaluable manual for managing retirement.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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