Ed Slott - Your Complete Retirement Planning Road Map: A Comprehensive Action Plan for Securing IRAs, 401(k)s, and Other Retirement Plans for Yourself and Your Family

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Lou was a daredevil. His last words were, Watch this!

Obituary featured in USA Today (June 22, 2006)

Planning for retirement is no place to be a daredevil, and yet most people are just that, even though they may not think of themselves as one. But anyone who spends a lifetime building up a retirement nest egg and does not take the time to check up on it once in a while to make sure all systems are go is indeed flying without a net and tempting fate.

Imagine getting in your car day after day without ever giving a thought to whether it's got oil in the crankcase or needs a tune-up, without ever having a mechanic take a look under the hood or kick the tiresjust to trust that it will always start, always get you where you want to go. You wouldn't think of treating your car that way, and yet if a car breaks down, it can be fixed or replaced. You can call AAA and get it towed, or just leave it by the side of the road and walk awayas I once did years ago when my 1966 Mustang suddenly died on me at the Southern State Parkway tollbooth on Long Island. My dad had to come and pick me up, shaking his head at me in disbelief as my brother gave me his what a moron laugh. But, hey, what was the big deal? It was just a car.

The same cannot be said of your life savings. If that breaks down due to lack of proper care and maintenance, it would take another lifetime to replaceand nobody gets a second chance!

So, this book is for all you daredevils out there who seldom if ever look under the hood of your retirement savings, wherever your account (or accounts) may be housed: a 401(k) plan; a 403(b) plan (also known as a Tax Sheltered Annuity Plan) for employees of schools, hospitals, and tax-exempt organizations; a 457 plan (for governmental employees) or any other company-sponsored retirement plan; an Individual Retirement Account (IRA); a Roth IRA; or a self-employed retirement plan like a Keogh, SEP IRA (Simplified Employee Pension) or SIMPLE IRA (Savings Incentive Match Plan for Employees).

Now that I am older and wiser, I do bring my car in for servicing, where the service department manager tells me that he gives it a proper checkup by putting it through a rigorous fifty-eight-point diagnostic using the latest computer technology. If pressed, I probably couldn't come up with more than five things to look at under the hood of my car that might conceivably break downand he listed fifty-eight!

It suddenly hit me that the same is true for retirement accounts, where many things can go kaput without careful monitoring. Most people just open an account, make contributions, maybe make some investment choices, and that's about it until they retire and start collecting. But by then it's too late to fix what may have gone wrong along the wayand believe me, bad, bad things can happen. For example, you could go broke and end up giving most of your retirement funds back to the government. Of course, going broke is not the end of the world. Lots of people go broke. That's why it's important to know how the prospect of having to declare bankruptcy will affect your retirement savings, tax-wise and otherwise. Remember, unless you're in a Roth IRA, where you pay the tax on your contributions up front, your retirement account has yet to be taxed, so not all of the money you have saved all these years is really yours.

A healthy retirement account is always a function of a long period of disciplined saving and investing (unless you inherited it, which is an even better plan and a great shortcut!). You would hate to think that after twenty, thirty, or even forty years or more of diligent saving that you slipped up in the end by passing most of it on to Uncle Sam rather than your family. And that's just one of the things that can go wrong!

So, I decided that a process for giving retirement accounts a regular, thorough look under the hood and kick of the tires, a checkup with the same rigorous precision of an automotive diagnostic, was needed. A system that would ensure no moving parts were overlookedand thus keep retirement account owners, their beneficiaries and families from being financial daredevils.

Your Complete Retirement Planning Road Map is that system. There are many, many things relating to retirement accounts that demand regular attention and monitoring in order to make sure nothing goes off track. How many can you come up withwithout looking at the Contents page, that is? This book looks at more than 250 of themand, most important, shows you how to keep proper tabs on those potential problem areas and tune things up BEFORE they become an issue!