Josh Jalinski - Retirement Reality Check: How to Spend Your Money and Still Leave an Amazing Legacy

CONTENTS

I want to thank:

Mommymy heart aches that the woman whom I danced with to You Raise Me Up at my wedding is no longer on this earth. I miss your hugs and your unconditional love. I am forever indebted to the Lord for the love of the best mom in the world.

Daddythe day I had been dreading for 30 years came true last year. I lost my biggest fan, my most avid listener, and the greatest dad in all the world. Your death was my fear as a kid, my fuel as an adult, and I hope that someday my kids will think Im as great as you and Mom. Im glad I will see you and Mom againbecause He lives.

Bethiemy heart, the only love of my life, you are fiercely loyal, my greatest muse, the most tender mother, and the dearest friend. The loveliest beauty in all the universe. I married up and will spend my days praising the Lord for allowing me the privilege of being married to someone I dont deserve. A wife of noble character who can find? She is worth far more than rubies.

Elisabeth (wise and kind), Marilyn (smart and sweet), Josh (congenial and intelligent), Judah (discerning and a leader), Moses (healing and loving), and baby due just as this book comes outI am so blessed to have the most beautiful, smart, strong, and kind kids, who are a testament to the Lord and their mommy.

Sweet baby Grace. The day you were born was the happiest and saddest day of my life. At least we met once. Looking forward to seeing you in eternity.

Bill (never misses a show), Tina (always there for me), and Jessica (through the years you never let me down)the most loving siblings in all the world.

My mother-in-love and father-in-love, Bet and Mike. So glad I have in-laws who love so deeply.

Matt, Nini, Popi, and all my family in heaven looking down on us.

I am indebted to Phil Revzin for his significant help with turning conversations on the car ride home into a real book. Complete thanks to Steve Blumenthal, John Mauldin, Larry Kotlikoff, Sara Kendrick (my patient and tireless editor), Jeff Farr (my other longsuffering editor), Beth Metrick (production), Matthew Bomberger (best graphic designer I know), the folks at HarperCollins Leadership, Barry Dyke, and Tim Burgard for taking a chance on me.

Without the experiences and support from my clients and staff family at Jalinski Advisory Group, Inc., and Wealth Quarterback, LLC, this book would not exist. You are family and loved and appreciated. Thank you to Jim, Shelly, Lori (my first real employee), Michele, Elaine, David, Nicolette, Rich, Carl, JoAnn, Tina, Tyler, and Jess. My CPA, Tony. My pastor, Bill, who comes late to the hospital when our kids are born... and when our sweet baby was born asleep.

Megan Close Zavala, for believing in the book from the start. Wendy Keller, whose personal story inspired me to finish this project amid the greatest loss of my life. She is equally inspiring as an agent.

I want to thank my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, most of all, because money isnt the purpose of life... God is.

MEET KENNY

If you lose my money, Im going to kill you.

What would possess a 58-year-old man to say that to me? Kenny is six foot five with the build of a lumberjack. His grip nearly crushes the person on the other side of a handshakein this instance, that was me. I was scared.

When I first met him, Kenny hated financial advisors. His first two advisors had shipwrecked his life savings.

Kenny was so mad at his previous financial advisors that he vowed never to speak to one again. He woke up in the middle of the night in cold sweats from worrying about his future. For Kenny, retirement didnt beckon; it loomed.

Sound familiar? Millions of people like Kenny, and probably you, have either been failed by the conventional approaches to financial planning or have been too confused or scared to even get involved with them.

Youre not to blame, but much of conventional financial planning wisdom is flawed.

Most of what is sold as sound financial advice is either outdated or marketed as a one-size-fits-all package. It often doesnt work for people with out-of-the-ordinary circumstances or preferences.

A lot of people I see have dabbled in financial products theyve seen advertised on TV or the web or heard about in books by financial gurus. These productsand yes, theyre very much products, like a washing machine or a new carrange from stocks and funds to annuities to long-term-care insurance to whole life insurance to bond ladders, and more. Theyre all legitimate and can be used in constructing your financial plan.

But...

Any financial product is a tool. It can be used for either good or ill, depending on the financial plan. As I will say over and overits the most important thing you should take away from this bookget a plan before you get any product. Plan and process should precede product.

A LEGACY

This book is dedicated to my parents, Bill and Marilyn, who loved Jesus, their family, and Mickey Mouse. They left me a godly legacy of love and selfless service to others. They devoted their lives to helping others struggling with addiction and both recently passed away within six months of each other. They didnt want to worry about their money but had to due to their many disabilities. They did what normal people were supposed to docancel their insurance policies and buy index funds. If they would have followed some of the strategies in this book, they wouldnt have needed me to give them a job. The reason I wrote this book is because the vast majority of Middle America is misinformed, as my parents were, about money management and protective strategies for their money.

Kenny, like my parents, made bad decisions in part due to a legacy of many decades of rigid, poorly explained advice from countless personal-finance websites, newspapers, and magazines. This information only got more rigid and more poorly explained as computers took over from economists scribbling formulas on chalkboards. Poor advice also abounded with the exponential growth of financial cable networks and the financial celebrities they helped make famous.

Many of these people mean well, but those who book guests for these shows or author these stories are usually former English majors hired for their ability to craft a compelling financial piece. Or they are social media mavens who know how to generate web traffic. Theres nothing wrong with this, except that they generally borrow stories from groupthink or conventional wisdom. Many times, they do not have access to cutting-edge financial information.

Theres also nothing wrong with doing research online, if you keep in mind that Google isnt the internets equivalent to the old library card catalog; its one of the biggest businesses in the world for a reason. We like to search for free, and Google sells our data. For instance, if you type the word annuities into the website, a leading default youre offered is annuities are bad, and one of the top paid websites advertised is for an advisor who famously offers lists of why annuities are bad investments. He or she pays to be at the top of the Google surf engines. Its good marketing but often misinforms.

So why read another book full of financial planning advice? This one in particular?

A HOLISTIC APPROACH

Here youll find a holistic approach to your finances that can be easily tailored to any situation, while offering you a set of tools used to potentially generate more income from what you already have, spend your money in a way that you enjoy, and still leave a legacy for family or causes that are dear to you.

Youll find that a lot of the old, outdated rules seem perversely designed to make you suffer rather than enjoy your money throughout your life. But rules are made to be broken, given the right circumstances. My approach will give you an in-your-face look at how traditional financial planning wisdom has failed you. Here are the conventional rules that are not setting you up to live your best financial life: