Type of bind: Hardcover
Format: Bargain Price
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 320
Printing Date: December 29, 2004
Sale Popularity Level: 692489
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Product Description:
Ed Slott’s book The Retirement Savings Time Bomb . . . and How to Defuse It taught Americans how to protect their hard-earned cash from the IRS’s coffers. Now, “America’s IRA expert” (Mutual Funds Magazine) returns with a bulletproof plan for ensuring your IRA’s continued longevity, tax-favored, for generations.
In Parlay Your IRA, Ed Slott shows you how to make the most out of your retirement plan. Slott's three-step strategy cuts through the tax laws and provides simple, easy-to-follow instructions for managing your IRA and other retirement income. Learn what you can do to parlay it into a fortune during your lifetime, and what you must do now to ensure that your beneficiaries will have all the options available to capitalize on the opportunity you've created for them to keep your money growing.
Packed with strategies, tips, answers to frequently asked questions Parlay Your IRA into a Family Fortune offers real solutions to making the most of your retirement money.
Learn how to:
* Achieve unlimited tax-free income when you retire.
* Pass more assets on to loved ones and other beneficiaries
* Keep retirement assets in the family for decades, even generations, and pay minimal or no taxes
*Protect your retirement account from creditors, divorce, bankruptcy, lawsuits, or other problems that could expose it to loss
*Use a Roth IRA to build a tax-free fortune
* And much, much more
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
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This is both a very good and very bad book. Slott is a CPA and his bio indicates that he specializes in IRA law and estate planning. The retirement column in the Wall St. Journal uses him as an IRA expert. If you've seen Slott on PBS, you know he is also a pitchman and showman. This book is a mixture of expert IRA info and advice and wild overselling.
On the plus side:
This book is full of IRA information and good IRA advice presented in a very readable manner. I made dozens of notes in the front cover while reading this book. An excellent IRA reference. And I think the book does a service by pointing out that the IRA code has (sort of) a loophole that allows the 'effective' taxes paid on the IRA to be greatly reduced if the IRA is passed on to younger family members who should (Slott recommends) only take out the minimum annually over their lifetimes. Slott calls this the 'stretch' IRA.
On the negative side:
Your IRA can grow into a FAMILY FORTUNE, he screams, with pages of tables showing a 100 thousand IRA growing to millions (in one case to nearly 300 million if left to grow into well into the 21 century!). Nonsense, what about the time value of money? Slott never heard of it (or pretends he never heard of it). The reality, of course, is that if your income tax rate is, say, 33% then when you withdraw IRA funds you lose 1/3rd of it to taxes. The best that even a perfect tax strategy can do is recover this 1/3rd. Nice, but hardly a fortune.
Slott provides a useful check list of features an IRA contract should have. You would think that maybe he would read the IRA contracts of top IRA providers (like Fidelity, Vanguard) and tell us how they stack up? Nope, that's our job, not his.
Convert to a Roth IRA and your money will grow TAX FREE he screams. Slott's very positive on Roth IRA's, too positive. I worked through a Roth conversion example and find that the extra shielding that a Roth IRA allows can boost your after-tax returns a little. (Calculation details are in 'Roth Primer' section of the 'Charity' essay on my home page.) I calculate in a 6% market environment that Roth IRA will yield 6% vs an after tax yield for a traditional IRA of approx 5.4%, or an extra 0.6%/yr investment gain. However, there can be a serious downside to doing a Roth conversion that Slott doesn't mention. A large Roth conversion will likely be taxed at a much higher incremental income tax rate than normal minimum withdrawals, and since Roth has only a tiny yield advantage over a traditional IRA it could easily take a decade or more just to get even.
Rated by buyers 
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I found this book to be very helpful in my financial planning for retirement...it gives easy to follow steps,suggestions,ideas and guidelines for maximizing your IRA's,401k's and retirement funds. Ed Slott has provided us with another excellent source of information for the everyday Joes like me....he does not overwhelm you with minutia and needless facts and figures...By reading this book you may not become an IRA guru but it will enable you to ask the right questions to your professional financial planner.I have passed it on to my family members to read and make their financial plans accordingly.
Rated by buyers -
The author is easy to understand and makes this highly specialized material fun to read. I refer to this book and Mr Slott's other book, "The Retirement Savings Time Bomb" as my IRA Bible's. This is a must read for financial services professionals and consumers with money in IRA accounts.
Rated by buyers -
Ed does a great job on giving you detailed information of how to stretch your IRA assets for the subsequent generation. He also does a great job of including information on how to write your trust so that you can control your assets beyond the grave. This is mainly important for clients who have lots of assets in their IRAs or for people who just pass away before they use their IRA assets. Since you don't know when you are going to pass away, I think it is important to get your trust and your IRA beneficiaries set up as soon as possible.
One downside of this book is that Ed seems to sell more of his stuff - his newsletter and his training. If you read his books, I think you have most of the information you need unless you run into very complicated situations. If that happens, then I would suggest getting a good financial advisor, CPA, and an estate planning lawyer to assist you.
Rated by buyers 
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Ed Slott repeated alot of what was included in "The Retirement Savings Time Bomb...", so I was not as impressed with this book. You can get 98% of what to do in the "Time Bomb". But if you really want to save all your money to your kids and their kids, it should help you.
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