Retirement Planning Guidebook: Navigating the Important Decisions for Retirement Success

* THIS IS THE 2ND EDITION. THE 3RD EDITION IS NOW AVAILABLE (JANUARY 2026) *

The Retirement Planning Guidebook helps you navigate through the important decisions to prepare for your best retirement. You will have the detailed knowledge and understanding to make smart retirement decisions:

- Understand your personal retirement income style, which can then help you navigate through the conflicting opinions about retirement strategies to choose your right path.

- Learn about investment and insurance tools that may best resonate with your personal style.

- Determine if you are financially prepared for retirement by quantifying your financial goals (annual spending, legacy, and reserves for the unexpected) and comparing them to your available assets.

- Make smart decisions for when to start Social Security benefits, which could potentially support an additional $100,000 or more of lifetime income from Social Security.

- Develop a plan for making the best initial and ongoing choices from the alphabet soup of Medicare options, as well as how to find health coverage if you retire before Medicare eligibility.

- Assess where you wish to live in retirement and whether there are helpful ways to incorporate housing wealth into your retirement strategy.

- Decide how to manage your long-term care risk between self-funding, Medicaid, or private insurance, and take steps to support living at home for as long as possible.

- Understand how to manage your taxes to pay less, to avoid common pitfalls, and to have more for your lifetime and your legacy. You will be able to apply tax diversification, asset location, tax bracket management, and Roth conversions to enhance the sustainability of your retirement assets.

- Get your finances organized and understand how to get your estate and incapacity planning documents in order, including your will, account titling, beneficiary designations, financial power of attorney, and advance health care directives.

- Identify whether there is a role for trusts in your estate plan for reasons related to avoiding probate, controlling how and when assets are disbursed, obtaining creditor protections, or helping to manage estate taxes.

- Prepare for the non-financial aspects of retirement, including the need to find purpose and passion, to understand if there is a role for work in retirement, to enhance relationships and social connections, and to maintain an active and healthy lifestyle.

Retirement has an entire vocabulary associated with it. We'll demystify the 4% rule, sequence-of-return risk, time segmentation and buckets, reverse mortgages, income annuities, variable annuities, fixed index annuities, long-term care insurance, living trusts, irrevocable trusts, budgeting, the funded ratio, Medicare Advantage, Medicare supplements, diversified investment portfolios, Roth conversions, the hazards of the Social Security tax torpedo and increased Medicare premiums, buffer assets, 401(k) plans and IRAs, the rollover decision, distribution options for defined-benefit company pensions, required minimum distributions, qualified charitable distributions, aging in place, cognitive decline, and so much more.

The Retirement Planning Guidebook does not let important matters fall through the cracks. This is a comprehensive look at the key retirement decisions to achieve financial and non-financial success. You will have the foundation to make the most of your retirement years, and I hope you'll be able to do something great!

Wade D. Pfau, PhD, CFA, RICP® is the founder of Retirement Researcher, an educational resource for individuals and financial advisors focused on retirement income planning. He is a co-founder of the Retirement Income Style Awareness tool and a co-host of the Retire with Style podcast.

Dr. Pfau serves as a principal and the director of retirement research at McLean Asset Management, and as a Research Fellow with the LIMRA Retirement Income Institute. He is also a professor of practice at the American College of Financial Services and previously served as the director of the Retirement Income Certified Professional® (RICP®) designation program.

He holds a doctorate in economics from Princeton University and has published more than sixty peer-reviewed research articles across a wide range of academic and practitioner journals. His research and commentary have been featured in outlets including the print editions of The Economist, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time, Kiplinger's, and Money Magazine.