Christine Benz Collects 20 Lessons for a Successful Retirement

Christine Benz, the financial planning researcher and strategist, has penned a new book on retirement. “How to Retire: 20 Lessons for a Happy, Successful, and Wealthy Retirement” is scheduled for release on Sept. 17.

Benz, the director of personal finance and retirement planning at Morningstar, offered a sneak peek at the project in an interview with ThinkAdvisor. She noted that the book includes a “very special foreword” by Jonathan Clements, the longtime Wall Street Journal columnist and author.

It also features insights from such “retirement VIPs” as Michael Finke, Carolyn McClanahan, William Bernstein, Cameron Huddleston, David Blanchett, Jean Chatzky, Wade Pfau, Mary Beth Franklin and Jamie Hopkins. Each engages with Benz in a focused conversation on one key area of retirement planning.

“I’m profoundly grateful to all of them,” Benz said. “The real goal of the book was to try to harness all of their great wisdom and share it with the public. The goal is not to say that I have all the answers to retirement. We’ve tried to approach this topic with a sense of humility.”

While the book includes many points of consensus on achieving a successful retirement, Benz said, it also features areas of “friendly and very informative” disagreement among the experts. Two examples are the best way to construct a retirement portfolio and the appropriate role of guaranteed income annuities.

Benz tried to capture the deep challenges and the big opportunities that people face preparing for and navigating life after work. She hopes that the book will be of use to both financial professionals and their clients.

Here are some highlights from the conversation.

THINKADVISOR: Can you tell us about where the idea for the book came from and why you went with the 20 lessons approach?

CHRISTINE BENZ: Yes, of course. The genesis for the book and its structure came out of discussions with my editor at Harriman House. We had been talking about me doing some sort of retirement book for a while now, and this is what we settled on.

At one point, he said to me: “You do these Long View podcast interviews with all these experts. What if we were to structure a book around it and you used an interview format for the book?” And so, the idea was to take these great conversations with retirement thought leaders and have each of these offer a lesson about how to do manage some aspect of retirement planning.

What I love about the project is that it’s not just about the retirement math. As Michael Finke says early on, retirement planning is not just a math problem. There are so many other dimensions, behavioral considerations and just personal issues that play into retirement planning. We cover all of this in the new book.

Was anyone hard to pin down to participate? Or did they all join in enthusiastically?

Oh, I don’t think there was anyone who was hard to get from my wish list, which was just wonderful. I had some great conversations with them all over last summer, and from there we got moving into the editing process.

As you know, moving from a raw transcript to a fluid, readable discussion takes a lot of work. It’s about understanding how to organize the information so that it flows logically on the page and is really getting across what you want to get across.

My editors helped me a lot with that, with understanding what information to prioritize and how to make sure these experts were getting the right information across to readers.

How did you select the particular 20 topics?