The 7 most important equations for your retirement

This blog’s title comes from the title of a book by Moshe Milevsky. The full title is “The 7 Most Important Equations for Your Retirement — The Fascinating People and Ideas Behind Planning Your Retirement Income” (Wiley, 2012).   

I’ve written a full review, which will appear in the October issue of Life Insurance Selling and on LifeHealthPro.com. The book is important enough — given that we financial professionals are in the business of designing outcomes — that I thought I would suggest it in the weekly blog too. 

The essence of “The 7 Equations” is this central question: how long will the money last in retirement and how should it be managed?  

In the pages of this book, you’ll meet Solomon Huebner — the Wharton professor who founded The American College and who created the human life value concept (incidentally one of my heroes; here he’s the point person for the subject of financial legacies and more); Paul Samuelson (the legendary economist on how much should be invested in risky stocks vs. safe cash); Irving Fisher (retirement spending rates); Edmond Halley (asking, is a pension annuity worth it? And, yes, it’s the celestial Halley; it turns out he wasn’t just about the comet); Benjamin Gompertz (how long will retirement spending last?); Leonardo Fibonacci (how long will his friend’s money last? Which may have been the question that started the whole financial planning ballgame); and Andrei N. Kolmogorov, a Russian math genius (is the current plan going to last?). 

At any rate, if you want to read a book full of wonderful stories about how, in seven steps, we got from Fibonacci helping a friend to financial planning, run don’t walk to your local bookseller.