The Discerning Investor: Personal Portfolio Management in Retirement for Lawyers (and Their Clients)

Book Synopsis: Winner of the 2023 EIFLE (Excellence in Financial Literacy Education) Award for Adults' Book of the Year: Investing & Retirement Planning “A clear, concise, and wise guide to retirement planning.” – Kirkus Reviews

The Discerning Investor addresses the critical time in your investor life cycle: your transition into retirement. Never having retired before, you may continue managing your investments as you did in your 40s and 50s, not realizing that handling finances in retirement calls for a completely different approach, one that secures 30 years with no paycheck.

The Discerning Investor lays out the framework for conceptualizing a retirement portfolio, with an emphasis on anticipating and thus avoiding mistakes such as misjudging risk. Part I of the book starts with basic principles, introducing personal portfolio management and examining how to manage uncertainty, which is part of every investor's life.

Part II focuses on the “personal” part of portfolio management, helping you understand your “numbers” and needs, including how to calculate your retirement income gap, how to judge the source of cash flow to fuel withdrawals, how to project future needs, and how to set investment objectives and monitor progress.

Part III provides insights and tools for understanding the experts who offer retirement portfolio management services, as well as for comparing firms based on their service models, with a special focus on conflicts of interest that get in the way of unbiased advice. The author’s unique perspective and expertise are particularly apparent in her detailed overview of Form CRS, a disclosure document mandated by the SEC that was rolled out in June 2020. Form CRS can help you to quickly grasp what your client experience might be like with a given brokerage or investment advisory firm.

Part IV returns to personalization and offers self-assessment tools to help you flesh out your investment strategy and move from planning to action. An innovative assessment tool (Know Your Representative Rule), modeled on the brokerage industry’s Know Your Customer Rule, helps you put things into perspective based on your own personal views.

The Discerning Investor gives you insights and a framework upon which to shape your own way of managing your retirement portfolio. Kirkus Reviews concludes: “Jason’s presentation is intellectually rigorous—instead of self-help-style nostrums, she furnishes concrete, actionable advice substantiated with empirical data. Moreover, despite necessary excursions into technicality, this is a thoroughly readable book that will be entirely accessible to those with a limited understanding of investment strategy.“

“Another of its virtues is that it never dispenses hyperbolic promises and unflinchingly confronts the reality of risk: ‘In my experience, the most satisfied investors are those who embrace the investor’s dilemma, understanding that risk (uncertainty) and reward (high returns) are forever and always intertwined.’“

“Overall, this is an impressively informative book that attests to the author’s 30-plus years of experience in the financial industry.”

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