Feathering Your Nest: The Retirement Planner Lisa Berger

Built around the one truism of retirement planning-the sooner the better-- Feathering Your Nest is for anyone in their mid-thirties on up, proving them with accessible, realistic, and reassuring guidance for creating a nest egg.

Written by a financial writer, the book offers simple exercises to map out a plan and set a dollar figure of what is needed. And then it shows how to grow wealth. Dozens of investment options are covered, while subsequent chapters cover the complexities of insurance, mortgages and reverse mortgages, health care, wills and trusts, and taxes.

Did you know that if you take your $300,000 pension as a lump sum, the government will help itself to $93,000? Or that most retirees will need 60 to 80 percent of their pre-retirement income for a good 20 years after the last day on the job? Now you do--and