The Retirement Challenge: Will You Sink or Swim?: A Complete, Do-It-Yourself Toolkit to Navigate Your Financial Future - Softcover

Armstrong Iii, Frank

3.55

11 ratings by Goodreads

9780132361323: The Retirement Challenge: Will You Sink or Swim?: A Complete, Do-It-Yourself Toolkit to Navigate Your Financial Future

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0132361329 ISBN 13: 9780132361323

Publisher: Ft Press, 2009

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“Imagine that you board an airliner and are told that you will be piloting the plane. Such is the plight of tens of millions of Americans, on whom have been foisted a jumble of 401(k), 403(b), and 457 defined contribution plans, and are as well qualified to manage their retirement portfolios as they are to pilot a jet from Los Angeles to Boston. Since things aren’t changing any time soon, you may very well need flying lessons, and pronto. Frank Armstrong’s The Retirement Challenge: Will You Sink or Swim? is just the ground school you need.”

–William Bernstein, author of A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World and The Four Pillars of Investing: Lessons for Building a Winning Portfolio

“Armstrong and Doss have written a simple and understandable guide through the maze that is our financial world. If your goal is to outperform the vast majority of investors on the road to retirement, The Retirement Challenge: Will You Sink or Swim? paves the way.”

–TAYLOR LARIMORE, coauthor of The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing

“This is a great handbook for those planning for retirement. Armstrong and Doss not only tell you the right way to build a plan, they also show you how to avoid purchasing products from the wolves of Wall Street that lead investors to be sheared like sheep.”

–LARRY SWEDROE, author of The Only Guide to Alternative Investments You’ll Ever Needand Wise Investing Made Simple

“In today’s investment markets, this is an invaluable book. If you care about the quality of the rest of your life, you owe it to yourself and your family to read The Retirement Challenge: Will You Sink or Swim?”

–HAROLD EVENSKY, CFP�, AIF�, President, Evensky & Katz

In 48 quick, practical lessons, Armstrong shows how to assess what you have and what you’ll need to build a simple, reliable retirement plan. Better yet, the book’s easy online calculators do all the math for you. Investing for retirement has never been so sensible and simple! Includes free access to comprehensive Web-based tools and resources at www.Sink-Swim.com:

More than 75 easy-to-use online calculators and budget spreadsheets to help you get on track and stay on track
Sample asset allocation plans you can adjust for any stage of your career and any portfolio
Up-to-the-minute updates on pension law, regulation, enforcement, and estate planning
Free Sink or Swim Newsletter, and much more

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About the Author:

Frank Armstrong, III, CLU, CFP™, AIF, is the founder and principal of Investor Solutions, Inc., a fee-only registered investment advisor. He has more than 30 years’ experience in the securities and financial services industry. His bestselling book The Informed Investor was cited by BusinessWeek as one of the best investment books of the year. Frank has twice been named by Barron’s as one of the top 100 independent financial advisors. He was a featured columnist on Morningstar.com for a number of years and is a frequent contributor to AccountsWorld.com and FundsInteractive.com. He has appeared on “CNN Headline News,” “Your Money with Stewart Varney,” “PBS Morning Business Report,” CNBC, “Money Life with Chuck Jaffee,” and public radio stations around the country. Frank is widely quoted in the media, his articles appear in major financial magazines and Web sites, and he lectures nationwide on principles of investment management.

Jason R. Doss is an attorney with the Atlanta-based law firm, The Doss Firm, LLC. He represents consumers against the financial services industry in securities arbitrations and consumer class action litigation. Jason has a proven track record of fighting for consumers’ rights and for taking major corporations to task. Over the last few years, he has initiated some of the largest consumer class action cases in the country. Since 2001, Jason has been an active member of the Public Investors Arbitration Bar Association (PIABA), a national organization devoted to representing investors in securities arbitration.

Introduction

Introduction

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are probably not stressing about their retirement income—but many Americans are. Study after study shows that they are not on track to support themselves in retirement and are behind their parents at the same age. Yet, most Americans spend more time researching which flat screen TV to buy than planning for retirement. Like Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, they choose to “worry about that tomorrow.”

I can guess some reasons why you might put off dealing with your retirement: it’s not fun, it takes a long time, it’s complicated, it’s difficult, it’s confusing—it’s all the above! I sympathize. Really I do. But I don’t believe it’s any of those things. Well, OK, perhaps your version of fun is a little different from mine. But planning your retirement isn’t an ordeal. It can be done quickly, elegantly, simply, and economically. Hang in there with me. I’m going to prove it to you.

My first book, The Informed Investor, delivered the Cliff Notes of an MBA investment class. I reviewed investment theory and practice as it developed over the last 50 years. I’m not going to do that again in this book, but if you feel the need for more background, I recommend The Informed Investor.

This time, I’m going to stick to practical, actionable information and strategies for retirement planning. If The Informed Investor was 90% theory and 10% action items, Sink or Swim is 90% specific information and action items. It gives you the tools to take control of your financial success without drowning in trivia or being overwhelmed by boring repetitive chores.

First, you meet your pension plan. You learn what it is, how to calculate benefits, how it works, what can go wrong, what to do if something goes wrong, and whether it’s even attractive enough for you to participate. If it’s not, you have viable alternatives and, under a 2008 U.S. Supreme Court Ruling, some recourse.

Next, wherever you are in your career, there are smart moves you want to pursue to maximize your retirement benefits. Whether you are right out of school, or already in retirement, you have lots of options to control your benefits.

How much will you need for retirement? Early in your career, it might be hard to estimate, but as you get closer, you can refine your guesstimate. You will learn how.

Finally, you learn how to invest your retirement assets economically and effectively while controlling risk to give yourself the highest probability of success in meeting your goals. Best of all, the system is easy to monitor and set up, and it works with all your investment accounts, whether inside a pension plan or your taxable accounts.

Do-It-Yourself - A companion Web site, http://www.Sink-Swim.com, provides you with a wealth of additional information and updates. Visit this Web site for the following:

Hundreds of articles on investment theory, products, and best practices.

Updates to pension law, regulation, and enforcement.

Over 75 calculators that let you see how much you need to contribute for a prosperous retirement and whether you are on track to meet your goals.

Sample asset allocation plans that can be adjusted for any stage of your career and portfolio size.

Budget spreadsheets.

Links to other useful sites.

Discussion groups and a blog.

A Sink or Swim newsletter.

Exclusive Web bonus material: Estate planning issues with retirement accounts.

The Retirement Challenge—Sink or Swim is a reference work you can consult so when you have a retirement planning concern, you can identify it, understand it, take corrective action, and get back out on the golf course of life. For instance, if you are faced with a career change or forced early retirement, the sections in this book on changing jobs and IRA rollovers will be invaluable.

You might not need or even want to read every chapter word for word, or you might want to come back to some sections later. For instance, if you don’t have a defined benefit pension plan, it won’t wreck your life not to read that chapter. And if your primary concern is required minimum distributions for folks over 701⁄2, reading the sections on early retirement tactics might not benefit you much. Feel free to pick and choose as your situation warrants.

Given the limited time most of us have and the various demands made upon our time, a system that requires minimum intervention and attention, yet still carry you to your goal, is the one that is most likely to be employed, and most likely to succeed. What’s needed is an autopilot-type approach that is reasonably simple to set up and, once set up, will tend itself.

As a former airline pilot, I have a great appreciation for autopilots. By doing the grunt work of keeping the airplane in level flight headed in the right direction, autopilots free up the pilot for higher-level tasks, making aviation safer and more reliable. However, even the best autopilot needs to know where it’s supposed to go and needs some degree of monitoring. Flight planning and situational awareness are still an important part of mission success. So, you can’t bail out entirely, but you can limit your involvement to high-level planning and supervision.

Political correctness is not my strong suit. Everybody who knows me knows exactly how I feel about almost everything. You won’t find me beating around many bushes. In particular, I believe that both the pension laws and the securities industry need major reform. They don’t work as advertised to assist Americans to meet their legitimate financial goals. Advise your elected representatives that this is a critical issue that must be addressed. Let them know you are watching. In the meantime, you have to work with the current system and, if you understand it, you can pick and choose the parts that will work best for you—if you cherry-pick the system, you can make it work wonderfully.

In the spirit of full disclosure, my daytime job is providing investment advice. So, naturally I believe that competent, objective advisors add value. Not everyone shares that opinion, however. Some investors are determined to “go it alone.” If you fit into this category, following the principles I present will improve your investment results. If you want to delegate to a professional, I’ll lay out how to choose one that is both competent and objective.

During my occasional appearances as an expert witness in securities arbitration and litigation, and during Jason Doss’s career as a plaintiff’s attorney securities litigator, we get to see more than a few investment crashes. The vast majority should never have happened. Crashes happen when the investor or advisor violates important investment principles. By looking at how other people screwed up, you can reduce the chance of being the next victim. Jason Doss is one of America’s brightest securities litigators. He provides a lot of our crash analysis in this book, so you can learn from other people’s mistakes.

There really are sharks in the financial waters. And there are lifeguards. Unfortunately, sharks and lifeguards might look somewhat alike to the casual observer. One of the biggest mistakes investors make is trusting the wrong advisors. Jason has a lot of experience with the sharks. Although Jonah might have gotten off lucky with the whale, Jason is the first to admit it’s hard to retrieve a swimmer once he’s been eaten by a shark. Better to avoid them in the first place.

With millions of boomers approaching retirement, and trillions of dollars changing hands from pensions to the boomers, retirees are a target-rich environment for the financial industry. Sharks circle endlessly, looking for that juicy, easily picked-off meal. Sharks don’t have morals; they just eat things that look tasty. Sharks have many distinguishing characteristics, however, and can rather easily be avoided if you know how to spot them.

If you do get bitten by a shark, all might not be lost. Although there are significant legal differences and performance expectations between fiduciary advisors and salespeople, all financial advisors are held to minimum standards of care and might be accountable for losses that occurred as a result of their lapses. Recovering losses is an uphill battle, however, so it’s best to avoid the problem in the first place. As Ben Franklin so aptly put it: “An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure.”

As a lawyer who represents investors, I see firsthand what happens when things go wrong. Even though the circumstances of each case and client are different, they all have one thing in common: All of my clients have lost money, trusting that their financial professional was acting in their best interest. I am faced with the difficult task of trying to get money back from brokerage firms, investment advisors, and insurance companies. If Frank Armstrong is the swim instructor in this analogy, then I am the paramedic. Most of the time, clients come to my office because they have nowhere else to turn. Unfortunately, though, most investors do not know that they can recover their losses from financial advisors who give bad advice. Let me take this opportunity to correct a common misconception:

Investing your money with a financial professional is not gambling!

If your trusted professional gives you bad advice, they (not you!) are responsible for the losses, and the laws allow you to recover your damages from the financial advisors and their firms. However, you do not want to rely on a paramedic to save your life. The best (and less painful) approach is not to drown in the first place!

Frank Armstrong’s vast knowledge and experience with financial issues and his no-nonsense style of writing is the best way to learn about these daunting issues. If you wait to hear the topics in this book for the first time from a broker (that is, a salesperson), you will undoubtedly turn into someone who doesn’t ask questions and blindly follows the advice of a stranger with a likeable personality. That is the best way to drown and lose your hard-earned nest egg.

News flash: Sharks always smile before they bite! One of the biggest mistakes that I see investors make is that they do not do their homework before picking a financial professional or before agreeing to an investment strategy recommended by a trusted professional. The question of who is investing your money is just as important as how your money is invested. All too often, investors choose their advisor based solely on personality. This is a big mistake because con-artists or simply incompetent salespeople always have a likeable personality. Before picking an advisor, you must dig deeper into their background and be able to articulate your investment goals prior to your first meeting. This book helps you separate the experts from the idiots.

My goal for this book is to keep you from becoming a victim of a terrible financial experience, and to provide you with the practical tools that help you to sleep better at night, knowing that you are in control of your own financial future. At various places along the way, I provide real-life examples of what can happen if you are not prepared to tackle the financial issues that face millions of investors every day. These examples are meant to reinforce the lessons explained by Frank Armstrong.

—Contributed by Jason Doss

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