RETIRE AND REFIRE

A guide offers financial strategies for retirement packaged in an appealing narrative.

Retirement books with a financial focus tend to be straightforward, factual, and dry. Real estate investor/philanthropist Barbera, author of Building Wealth 101 (2021), changes things up with a novel, engaging approach. Instead of delivering multiple chapters of the requisite dull verbiage about strategies for retirement saving, types of investments, and the like, Barbera couches the content in creative storytelling. He takes readers on a riverboat cruise with passengers of various ages. The vessel, named The Golden Years, cruises down the Mississippi from St. Louis to New Orleans, providing a combination of financial counsel and leisure activities. This enables the author to weave a story around five couples on the cruise, each at different pre-retirement stages of their lives. It also cleverly exposes readers to financial concepts in an entertaining fashion since the fictional passengers discuss what they learn along the way. Finance savvy crew members deliver “lectures” about relevant topics, such as inflation, recession, and investment vehicles, including annuities, stocks, and bonds. Interspersed with these serious lectures are lighter moments, such as descriptions of off-boat excursions and informal conversations among the couples, who get to know one another and compare their lives and challenges. As part of the cruise program, couples complete a “Reality Check,” answering specific questions about their finances. Throughout the volume, the Reality Check is reviewed and discussed with each couple by a crew member. This is another inventive way of involving readers, who can “overhear” the conversations and digest the details of each financial assessment. Given the range of ages and the couples’ differing situations, a reader should be able to relate to at least one of the fictional discussions. Through Barbera’s method of storytelling, he can share general financial strategies and then show how they can be applied to specific, real-life situations. Some readers may feel the river cruise is a bit contrived, but the author manages to craft a plausible scenario that facilitates comprehension and makes the book informative and enjoyable.

A retirement manual that employs excellent examples and authoritatively covers basics.