A formidably detailed and invaluably clear guide to not just achieving retirement security, but also maintaining it.
A financial manual focuses on securing a rock-solid retirement.
In his book How Much Can I Spend in Retirement? (2017), the author gave readers a comprehensive analysis of the “risk premium” of the stock market, which relies on the notion that “while the stock market is volatile, it will eventually provide favorable returns for most retirees and will outperform bonds.” The three major categories of risk in such a setting, according to Pfau (Reverse Mortgages, 2018, etc.), are market volatility, spending shocks like major medical expenses, and the longevity of the retirees themselves. A promoter of the probability-based approach to retirement planning, he looks on these risks with the sang-froid of the practiced gambler. “They see the stock market as a straightforward way to obtain superior retirement outcomes,” the author writes of his fellow believers. “Safety-first advocates disagree.” In his new work, Pfau offers a correspondingly detailed analysis of a fundamentally different approach to retirement investment, the safety-first method, whose supporters “are generally more willing to accept a role for insurance as a source of income protection to help manage various retirement risks.” Using the simple analogy of mountain climbing, the author points out that the probability-based approach to retirement is mainly concerned with accumulating enough financial security to reach the summit whereas alpinists will readily admit that the descent is always more dangerous. “The objective of a retirement saver is not just to make it to the top of the mountain, which we could view as achieving a wealth accumulation target,” Pfau writes. “The real objective is to safely and smoothly make it down the mountain, spending assets in a sustainable manner.” Throughout his densely packed account, the author helpfully lays out for readers the various aspects of his topic in a fierce amount of specific details. His book comes replete with useful charts and graphs and extensive suggestions for further reading. All of this supporting material is buttressed by Pfau’s own considerable skill at clarifying even the most abstruse subject facing retirees, whether it be the various kinds of annuities the author backs for his income-pooling conception of retirement income or the complexities of navigating those instruments, in the form of things like rollup and withdrawal rates. More and more Americans are retiring, and they are living longer than ever before. But the contours of that retired life have been fundamentally changing for decades; the days of people guaranteeing their financial securities with one simple retirement plan are largely gone. Pfau’s manual uses as its starting point this complicated new landscape. He carefully takes readers through the arcana of terms and plans and the realities they’ll face in their retirement years, explaining everything with a straightforward prose that will be a boon to those dealing with this challenging time. The author’s goal is to help individuals lay the foundation for not only financial competence in retirement, but also the ability to spend comfortably in those years. Pfau wants this group to achieve what he characterizes as the four financial goals of retirement: lifestyle, liquidity, longevity, and legacy.
A formidably detailed and invaluably clear guide to not just achieving retirement security, but also maintaining it.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-945640-06-3
Page Count: 366
Publisher: Retirement Researcher Media
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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