With Jane Bryant Quinn, personal finance expert and author of How to Make Your Money Last: The Indispensable Retirement Guide
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Jane Bryant Quinn is a nationally known commentator on personal finance, with books and columns read and trusted by millions. In her long career, she has established herself as one of America’s most reliable voices for people trying to manage their money well. In her public policy writings, she addresses matters including investor protection, health insurance, Social Security and the future of retirement accounts.
She writes a column every month for the AARP Monthly Bulletin and AARP.com on issues affecting people in mid-life and retirement. Her newest book, How to Make Your Money Last: The Indispensable Retirement Guide, was published in January, 2016.
She talks about the five stages people go through when they enter retirement. She emphasizes having an emotional plan in addition to a retirement plan – so you’re mentally prepared for all the freedom and the breakaway from routine (with upsides and downsides) that retirement brings. There’s the initial honeymoon period but after a while emptiness and a loss of status could set in, or your money might be going out the door faster than you thought, or you could get depressed over having nothing to do. So it’s important to get engaged in meaningful activities so you reorient yourself to being retired. She compares retirement to graduating from school, with that feeling of what am I going to do now?!
In her book – How to Make Your Money Last – Jane shows you how to turn your retirement savings into a steady paycheck that will last for life. Today, people worry that they’re going to run out of money in their older age, or when one spouse dies. She talks about how much money you should take out of your savings every year to make your money last 20-30 years or more. That won’t happen if you use a few tricks for squeezing higher payments from your assets—from your Social Security account (find the hidden values there), pension (monthly income or lump sum?), home equity (sell and invest the proceeds or take a reverse mortgage?), savings (should you buy a lifetime annuity?), and retirement accounts (how to invest and—critically—how much to withdraw from your savings each year?). The right moves will not only raise the amount you have to spend, they’ll stretch out your money over many more years. She also talks at length about using Immediate Pay Annuities to your advantage as an extra guaranteed income – the only type of annuity that she’d recommend to retirees so they can raise their standards of living.
She also offers up a look at savings and investments in a new way. If you stick with super-safe choices, the money might not last. You need safe money to help pay the bills in your early retirement years. But to ensure that you’ll still have spending money 10 and 20 years from now, you have to invest for growth, today. Jane shows you how. At a time when people are living longer, yet retiring with a smaller pot of savings than they’d hoped for, her book could become your guiding light into retirement.
