Matters and Considerations

I just started reading Your Complete Guide to a Successful and Secure Retirement by Larry Swedroe and Kevin Grogan. I'm sure there will be plenty of nuggets to pass along throughout the read, but I really enjoyed the forward by Wade Pfau, who does great work in the retirement income planning space. There's a lot more that goes into good planning outside of portfolio returns. Here's an excerpt below:

You need a vision for your life in retirement beyond just ensuring that your nest-egg is large enough.

You need to plan ahead for efficient lifetime tax strategies in terms of what types of accounts to hold assets in and how to draw from different accounts over time, while also managing required minimum distributions from qualified retirement accounts and taxes on Social Security benefits.                    

You need a strategy for claiming Social Security benefits that seeks to provide the best financial outcome rather than relying on the easy, but potentially costly, solution of claiming as soon as possible.

You need to understand Medicare and decide among the numerous options it provides for basic and supplemental coverage and prescription drugs.

You need to consider whether lifetime income guarantees through annuity products may improve plan success through their ability to help manage longevity and sequence-of-returns risk in retirement.

You need a plan for managing potentially large long-term care expenses, whether that be through self-funding, long-term care insurance, or spending down assets and relying on Medicaid.

You need to decide on the best way to incorporate home equity into the retirement plan, and whether a reverse mortgage opened earlier in retirement may be a valuable option to manage different retirement risks.

You need a risk management strategy using different types of insurance, which may include term or permanent life insurance, disability insurance, homeowners insurance, an umbrella policy, and so on.

You need an estate plan, including documents such as powers of attorney, wills, and consolidated information to help those who may need to manage the household finances in the event you cannot.

You need to educate your heirs on how they can continue with financial and life success over multiple generations.

You need to plan ahead for protecting yourself from elder financial abuse.

And finally, you do need an investment management strategy based on low-costs, diversification, proper exposure to the different risk factors, and that is shown through Monte Carlo software to provide the best risk/ return tradeoffs to maximize the probability of plan success as well as to minimize the harm of failure.

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Source: Your Complete Guide to a Successful & Secure Retirement (Larry Swedroe & Kevin Grogan)