Business-plan

I found the book clearly written but was surprised to find no index.

This is an amazing book - it clearly explains how you can plan for your retirement and help you to actually calculate the numbers yourself without depending on a planner. The book made me feel very empowered with my own finances. Thanks for writing this book - its awesome.

I too am a hispanic woman. I was quite intimidated by stocks and expecially that scary stock page in the newspaper. I could not believe it. I am a college graduate and a bank employee and here I am completely baffled by investments. I work in a bank. But I caught the last 15 minutes of her PBS special and was captivated as to how simply she explained it without being condisending. I needed someone to explain how to take control of my own finances and all of those dummy books were not as helpful as I had hoped. I truly felt like a dummy!! I especially liked the road lane analogy. Because now I know in what lane and what speed to go. Even though I am 27 and the recommended/investing age starts at 25. I am confident that my retirement will be smoother than most of today's retirees. I thank you very much Julie, you improved my life by allowing me to understand it more clearly. Thanks again. If you are ever in Chicago, look me up. I owe you a cup of Starbucks mochaccino or something!!

If you enjoyed and found this book useful, you might like "The Healing Journey Through Retirement" by Phil Rich, Dorothy Sampson, and Dale Fetherling. It provides important and useful information about the transition from work to retirement, and describes 5 transitional stages, and is helps people understand retirement through providing information and ideas, and a journal writing format.

The author makes an extremely persuasive arguement regarding his plan for the farmers of America. I recommend this book highly.

"Forecasting Retirement Needs and Retirement Wealth" is a collection of research papers using the first (1992) wave of the biennial Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to paint a picture of the financial health of the soon to be retiring pre-baby-boom generation. Each of these papers focussed on a different specific issue affecting those approaching retirement. Like a cookbook, where a few good recipes can be worth the purchase of the entire book, I found several chapters to be incredibly valuable, whereas other chapters have yet to arouse my interest.

One of the three chapters that I gained the most from was Chapter 2, "How Prepared Are Americans for Retirement?," which summarized several studies that attempted to gauge how well current and projected savings of near-retirees will meet their expected expenses and then used a software package to determine how well the subjects in the HRS study will fare.

A second study found in Chapter 3, "Projected Retirement Wealth and Saving Adequacy," broke down HRS subjects' wealth by mean, median, and deciles, as well as the proportion of housing wealth, financial wealth, social security wealth, and pension wealth held by each of these groupings. This chapter then went on to identify prescribed saving and replacement rates for each of these populations.

The last study I found very valuable was Chapter 5, "Explaining Retirement Saving Shortfalls." This section examined the wealth discrepancies between various HRS populations according characteristics such as marital status, race, education, health, and attitudes, and then attempted to explain the likelihood and extent of any shortfalls in their wealth accumulation. Later chapters would explore some of these demographic issues further: Chapter 6 looks at issues affecting "Women on the Verge of Retirement," while Chapter 7 looks at "Prospects for Widow Poverty." Chapter 8 further explores issues facing minorities at retirement. I expect that some of the chapters I have not mentioned will increase in value to me as time passes.

This book is written for a college level audience with various sections occasionally requiring re-reading to grasp the full implications of what is said. While most of the tables and graphs were self-explanatory, because it has been more has a decade since my last statistics class, I would have benefited from a better explanation of data such as that found in Tables 3, 4 and 5, in Chapter 5. Overall however, I have found this book very informative as I prepare for my own retirement. Since purchasing this book a year and a half ago, I have not hesitated to recommend it to others. I look forward to the issuance of studies utilizing subsequent waves of the HRS data.