How to Make Your Money Last:
The Indispensable Retirement Guide

NOW COMPLETELY UPDATED to reflect the changes in tax legislation, health insurance, and the new investment realities. In this “highly valuable resource” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) Quinn “provides simple, straightforward” (The New York Times) solutions to the universal retirement dilemma—how to make your limited savings last for life—covering mortgages, social security, income investing, annuities, and more!

With How to Make Your Money Last you will learn 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. 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.

You will also learn to look at your 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. Quinn shows you how. At a time when people are living longer, yet retiring with a smaller pot of savings than they’d hoped for, this book will become the essential guide.

REVIEWS

“A hugely valuable resource for readers, wherever they are on their personal financial timeline.” —Publisher’s Weekly

Quinn “targets the concerns of both recent and future retirees with volley after helpful volley of information (in a consummately well-organized presentation) necessary for a retirement that affords psychological as well as financial comfort… Her clarity of prose is matched with a generosity of spirit. —Booklist

In this comprehensive guide to managing retirement savings, Quinn provides savvy suggestions to people approaching, entering, or managing retirement. Those thinking about taking the plunge will value the focus on planning and “rightsizing” spending. New retirees will appreciate the step-by-step tips on which accounts to tap first and how to “prudently parcel your money out.” Finally, those further down the path may find useful advice in a series of “yes”/“no” scenarios, offering a roadmap to inform their own choices. The chapters conclude with concise summaries and bulleted lists, but the information in places is perhaps too comprehensive—the discussion of Social Security, for example, operates at a level of detail that only a die-hard planner may enjoy. VERDICT: Readers at these mature stages of planning will find valuable insight and resources here, making the book a good complement to others such as Laurence J. Kotlikoff and others’ Get What’s Yours and Emily Guy Birken’s The Five Years Before You Retire. With strategy and thoughtfulness, Quinn’s readers will be able to “get more from your assets than you probably think.”
—Doug Diesenhaus, Library Journal

I don’t review many books but I felt impelled to report on this one because as I read it, I found myself saying “I wish I had known that in 19xx”, or “Yes, I should have done it that way, I wonder what my mistake cost me?” Bottom line, anyone on the retirement track or in retirement should own this book. (Read full review) —The Mortgage Professor

Whether you’re planning to retire, or are already retired, Jane Bryant Quinn’s How to Make Your Money Last: The Indispensable Retirement Guide is one of the best “investments” you can make. (Read full review) —Larry Swedroe, Chief Research Officer of Buckingham Strategic Wealth