An exposé of America's retirement experiment, 'The Baby Boomer Dilemma' takes a deep dive into Pensions (both corporate and public), Social Security, 401(k), and Annuities. It features the nation's top economists on retirement and retirement income that include Nobel Prize-winning economists, and world-renowned economists from MIT, Stanford, Wharton, Berkely, York, and BYU. Government leaders over trusts include Congressmen, Trustees, SEC whistle-blowers, the "Father of the 401(k)" and the 2019 President of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners as well as industry competitive intelligence experts and authors. This is the first MPA-rated film that looks at retirement income.

~ PROLOGUE ~

FEAR IN RETIREMENT

"I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul." - William Ernest Henley

This is not your typical retirement planning book. I am not your average adviser. I am a man on a quest. A frustrated, dissatisfied, persistent man who during the peak of his career found out that his wife had lost her job, and so I went looking for some comprehensive financial planning advice.

And I couldn’t find any.

Since that time, I have been on a journey—there and back again. What I found was an industry fraught with discrepancies, a lack of education, a lack of transparency, and, in some cases, total and intentional deception. This got me angry. People like me who had worked a lifetime to save the money had no idea what they needed to do with the money once it came time to prepare for retirement.

We continue plodding along in the same old investments, hoping and praying that these die-at-your-desk retirement plans would somehow function when we needed them to.

Only, for my wife and I, the time of retirement had come up way earlier than expected, and we needed to know what to do now.

I kept making calls, setting up meetings, talking with the HR department where she worked. I sat down with advisers and fund managers at the big corporations whose names you would recognize, but I won’t name names in this book. They offered me pie charts, templates, and five-sentence questionnaires. They offered me one-size-fits-all solutions to my risk tolerance and the situation of my wife’s early retirement. Nothing about a 30-year timeline, rising taxes, sinking markets, rampant inflation, or life insurance.

Nothing about us as living, breathing people.

I was looking for real retirement planning and just not finding it. I thought, there has got to be somebody out there who knows how to do this right.

Then, one day, I met with Gene Wittstock.

Now, I’m a decisions guy. When I heard Gene talk about the Three Worlds of Money, I knew this was what I’d been looking for. I’d never seen anything like it before. It’s not super complicated or groundbreaking, but that’s the beauty of it—anyone can understand it. It functions, it makes sense, and it prepares you for the realities of retirement today.

Three meetings later, my wife and I were done, and we had a true plan in place that would see both of us to and through retirement. But I couldn’t stop thinking about all the people I knew who would be facing these decisions next. The experience of that search never left me. Gene and I continued to have conversations.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Today, I am an investment adviser representative. I ended up leaving my job, abandoning my career, and coming onboard with Gene. I am now on a mission to help serve his clients and get this education out there. That’s why I’m so different from every other adviser. I’m coming at this to you from the perspective of the client.

This is the book I was looking for when I was in your shoes.