Erin Botsford - The Big Retirement Risk: Running Out of Money Before You Run Out of Time

Erin T. Botsford is the founder of The Botsford Group, a financial services firm located in Atlanta, Georgia, and Frisco, Texas. Certain portions of the book may reflect positions and/or recommendations as of a specific prior date, and may no longer be reflective of current positions and/ or recommendations for various reasons, including regulatory changes. No reader should assume that the book serves as the receipt of, or a substitute for, personalized advice from Ms. Botsford or The Botsford Group, or from any other investment professional. Please remember that different types of investments involve varying degrees of risk. Therefore, it should not be assumed that future performance of any specific investment, investment product, or investment strategy (including the investments and/or investment strategies referenced in this book), or any of the books non- investment-related content, will be profitable, prove successful, or be applicable to any individuals specific situation. Should a reader have any questions regarding the applicability of any portion of the book content to his/her individual situation, the reader is encouraged to consult with the professional advisors of his/her choosing.

Published by Greenleaf Book Group Press
Austin, Texas
www.gbgpress.com

Copyright 2012 Erin T. Botsford

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the copyright holder.

The term Lifestyle Driven Investing is a trademark registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office and owned by the authors company, The Botsford Group

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Ebook ISBN: 978-1-60832-249-7

Ebook Edition

To my husband, Bob, the love of my life. Few people get to stay married to their best friend for over thirty years so I consider myself to be the luckiest girl on the planet! Thanks for your constant support and unconditional love. You truly had me at hello!

An estimated 47 percent of Americans born between 1948 and 1954 may not be able to afford basic expenses and uninsured health care costs through retirement. Employee Benefit Research Institute, 2010

CONTENTS

Chapter 6: Lifestyle Driven Investing:
Creating Your Preferred Future

Chapter 7: Lifestyle Driven Investing:
Choosing the Right Investment Products

Chapter 9: The Search for Income Continues:
What About Annuities?

INTRODUCTION

What comes to mind when you think about retirement? Playing golf three days a week? Having a home at the beach? Traveling with your grandchildren? Starting a new business? Building water wells in Africa?

Unfortunately, if you are like many people these days, thinking about retirement might make you want to reach for an antacidor something stronger. Maybe you cant forget about how the lives of retired friends and family members changed overnight when the markets crashed in September 2008. After years of hard work and careful savingpoof! Like a bad magic trick, their money disappeared before their eyes. And now you are shaking in your boots, worried that the same thing might happen to you.

The truth is, they didnt have to lose their ability to enjoy their lifestyle. Thats why Im writing this book. Though I wish I had a magic wand I could wave and restore the savings and chosen lifestyles of those who lost so much, thats not reality. What I can do is help you not only avoid similar calamity but also become wiser and learn to protect and sustain your lifestyle throughout retirement.

What has become incredibly clear to me in the last decade, particularly since September 2008, is that peoples confidence in just about everything has been shattered. As a member myself of the baby boom generation, I can relate to every bit of shakiness that comes with a lack of certainty about the future. I think you will agree that, more than anything, we all want to be assured that we will not run out of money before we take our last breath. Almost equally important, we would like to know that we will not become a burden to our children or to society. As retirees, or pre-retirees getting ready to exit the workplace, we cant help but ask ourselves, Do I have enough money? Will it last my lifetime? What about my spouse? My children? Is there a chance I will be forced to go back to work? Will Social Security be there when I am eligible to receive it? What about Medicare? Will my pension survive and continue to pay me? These are all incredibly important questions and ones I am sure you have asked yourself. Though I may not be able to answer these questions for you individually, I feel certain I can help you answer some of them for yourself.

I had one specific goal in mind when I decided to write this book: to restore the lost confidence among the retiree and pre-retiree crowd. Its no fun working for forty or fifty years, becoming an expert in your field, and then having no faith in your ability to sustain your lifestyle throughout your retirement. I want to show you that if you rethink how you make your investment decisions and adopt a new philosophy about money you can regain some of your lost confidence. I believe you can have the retirement you have always dreamed about. But I also believe many people will not be able to live that dream if they dont make some major shifts in the way they think about their money and how they manage their investments.

Unfortunately, many people are still investing the same way they have for the past thirty or forty years, not realizing how significantly the world of investing has changed. The old methods clearly wont work anymore, but many people have no idea what will work. The overwhelming majority of retirement planning and investing is still done with the premise that the stock and/or bond markets will always go up over the long term. But the two most important questions to ask are these: is that always true, and how long is long term? History shows us multiple decades in which this premise has not been the case. If someone is unfortunate enough to retire when the market goes flat or during a protracted down market, he or she faces the real risk of running out of money.

With this book I hope to show you an entirely new way to think about money, investing, and retirement planning. I am going to shatter the myths of Wall Street, which serve their purposes but could be disastrous to you and your retirement well-being. I will expose the failures inherent in traditional methods of retirement planning, and I will give you a new way to think about money and investing, a concept I have created over the last two decades called Lifestyle Driven Investing. You will quickly see how easy it is and how much it can take the guesswork out of investing for retirement.