The Straight-Talk Retirement Guide: Retirement planning without confusion, pressure, or gimmicks (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798199474078)

Two people retire the same year, in the same town, with the same amount saved. One sleeps soundly. The other lies awake doing math. The difference isn't their portfolio. It's their plan.

Most retirement advice treats your retirement like a calculation with one right answer: pick a withdrawal rate, choose an allocation, plug in the numbers. But the numbers aren't what determine the right plan. The variables underneath them are, and those variables are different for every person.

In The Straight-Talk Retirement Guide, financial advisor Sean Jantz cuts through the confusion, the sales pressure, and the one-size-fits-all products to show you how retirement actually works, in plain language, with no jargon and no agenda. Retirement, he argues, isn't a destination you arrive at. It's a design problem you solve, and the right design is the one that fits your life.

Inside, you'll learn:

• Why two people with identical savings can need completely different plans
• The five questions every retirement plan has to answer, and where most plans quietly fall short
• How to turn a lifetime of savings into a paycheck that lasts
• Why the order of your investment returns can matter more than the average, and how to protect against a bad start
• Where retirees lose the most money (hint: it's the tax layer, not the market)
• How to build a Retirement Stack where every dollar has a role and every account has a job
• How to plan for the things no one warns you about: long-term care, market shocks, and what happens to the spouse left behind

Whether you're a few years from retirement or already there, this book gives you a clearer way to see your own situation, and better questions to ask anyone who manages your money. It won't tell you what to buy. It will help you understand what you actually need.

Honest, readable, and refreshingly free of gimmicks, The Straight-Talk Retirement Guide is for anyone who wants to enter retirement with clarity instead of confusion.

Sean Jantz is a financial advisor and the founder of Jantz Wealth Solutions, where he helps retirees and people approaching retirement turn what they've saved into a retirement that fits their life.