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Practical, plain-language companions to the film — from the Financial First Aid Kit to the chapter-by-chapter class booklets.
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The essential companion to the film — a practical, plain-language kit for getting your retirement paperwork, questions, and priorities in order.
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The Safe Money Guide
An insider's guide to annuities covering how they work, fixed versus variable, payout options, tax treatment and qualified versus non-qualified contracts.
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Women: The Disadvantaged Retirement Sector
Uses the author's food bank volunteer experience to show how widowhood cuts household income and reshapes a woman's retirement overnight.
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Longevity Risk: Outliving Your Money
Explains why a retirement that now runs 20 to 30 years puts savings at risk of running out, using Social Security life-expectancy data to show how badly most people underestimate their own lifespan.
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Maximizing Retirement Income With Annuities
A comprehensive guide to using annuities to build income streams in retirement, walking through fixed, variable, indexed and immediate contracts and what each one is designed to do.
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Maximizing Social Security Benefits
Covers how benefits are calculated from your 35 highest-earning years, how full retirement age works, and how claiming timing can swing lifetime income by $50,000 to $100,000 or more.
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Building Guaranteed Income for Life
Addresses the hardest financial transition most people face: converting a lifetime of savings into a monthly paycheck that cannot be outlived.
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The IRA Tax Trap
Shows why a traditional IRA or 401(k) balance is not entirely yours — every dollar is taxed as ordinary income on withdrawal, not at capital gains rates.
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Avoiding Probate and Preserving Privacy
Describes what probate actually costs a family in time, money and privacy, and why dying intestate hands asset distribution to state law.
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Sequence of Returns Risk
Explains why a market downturn in the first years of retirement does permanent damage that the same downturn would not cause during your working years.
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Controlling Investment Fees
Breaks down expense ratios, advisory fees, commissions and the costs buried inside product structures, then shows how a 1% annual difference compounds into hundreds of thousands over a retirement.
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Inflation Risk: Protecting Your Purchasing Power
Makes the case that 3% inflation quietly cuts a fixed income's purchasing power by more than half over 25 years. Covers why healthcare inflation hits retirees hardest and what income sources keep pace.
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Safe Money Allocation: The 100 Minus Age Formula
Introduces the 100-minus-age rule as a starting point for splitting a portfolio between growth and safe assets, along with the 110 and 120 variants used for longer lifespans.
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Beneficiary Planning: Tax-Free Funds and Legacy Strategies
Argues that legacy planning matters for anyone with assets to pass on, not just the ultra-wealthy, and covers the SECURE Act's 10-year distribution rule for non-spouse beneficiaries.
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Fixed Indexed Annuities: Income Guarantees Explained
A plain-language explanation of how an FIA protects principal from market loss while crediting interest tied to an index, positioned as middle ground between CDs and market investments.
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Planning for Long-Term Care
Lays out the odds and the costs — a roughly 70% chance of needing care, a three-year average duration, and a national median over $120,000 a year for a private nursing home room.
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Eight Important Facts About Retirement Planning
Eight things that surprise most people about retirement, starting with the fact that the average American has saved just $95,776 and one in three has saved nothing
