Your Future Is Now
Your Blueprint for Solving Your Retirement Puzzle
The lucid retirement guide Your Future Is Now advocates for creating a plan and addressing holistic questions of finance and lifestyle change.
A prudent guide to the financial, social, and lifestyle decisions that retirement entails, Jeffrey Panik’s Your Future Is Now lays out goals, templates, and questions that can be addressed and adapted to develop a unique retirement plan.
Taking on the messy and bureaucracy-heavy decisions that accompany retirement, such as when to enroll in Medicare and claim Social Security, the book breaks down myriad complex issues that that arise when considering the end of professional employment. Topics from budgeting for living without regular W-2 income to life insurance, estate planning, and debt management are examined and organized into clear, multistep processes. Above all, the book advocates for creating a plan and addressing holistic questions of finance and lifestyle change—including moving house and taking up new hobbies—well in advance of retirement age. It argues that financial literacy, forethought, and planning can ease and enrich the transition between working and embracing one’s golden years.
Across twelve chapters, the book lays out useful tools and practices for ensuring a secure retirement. It places strong emphasis on accessibility, making complex ideas graspable and lowering the entrance bar on activities with daunting reputations. For instance, the risks, benefits, and financial costs of different kinds of insurance are given a step-by-step treatment. Slippery language like “riders” and “peril” are explained; the details of different kinds of coverage are handled under brief, discrete subheadings; and the reasons that Social Security disability insurance may not provide security as a sole insurance option are detailed. Elsewhere, in the chapter on identity theft—which can be devastating for retirees—the process for freezing credit with Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion is broken down into manageable steps, even including the phone numbers to call and the specific requests to make. This technique of turning ideas and complex processes into simple, no-nonsense bulleted lists or brief paragraphs makes the named tasks feel manageable.
The book’s meticulous organization makes it inviting and navigable, and the firm, professional tone of the prose is credibility boosting. The final chapter is dedicated to defining financial terms. This exactingness complements the book’s technique of using hypotheticals to teach lessons. Stories about individuals facing real-world retirement issues are sketched out, and then the elements and questions pertaining to their situations are broken down with action items to address. For example, the stories of a person with debt and a person without debt preparing for retirement are told, and their financials, including the differing risks to be vigilant of, are represented by a useful budgeting chart and articulated in three multipart topics. The directness and efficiency of the prose allows these passages to be both didactic tools and models for developing and analyzing financial plans. So much of the book, including these hypotheticals, is built around various forms of lists that its guiding, piecemeal explanations become dominant, though.
A retirement preparation guide covering financial and life decisions, Your Future is Now uses simple steps and practical solutions to bring clarity to a challenging topic.
Reviewed by
Willem Marx
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
