You traded life for money.
Now it’s money for life.
Fifty-four thousand hours inside other people’s retirement plans come down to one idea: in retirement, the job is the exchange rate — and the lever is cost. Six books. Six guides. Written by a fiduciary. Free, and free of any sales pitch.
The industry aims you at returns. Retirement is priced in costs.
When you worked, you traded life for money, and the job was the wage — getting the most money for the life you gave up. At retirement the exchange reverses. You spend the rest of your years trading money back for life, and the job becomes the exchange rate: the most life for every dollar.
The lever on that rate is cost — not just the lifestyle costs, but the quiet fees, the silent tax drain, the escalating tax on required distributions, the price of declining health, the costs hidden inside every product with “no fee.” Every book in this library is that one idea applied to a different room of your retirement.
Every retirement plan answers three questions. The pitch only asks one.
Income, costs, and growth — in that order. The seminar starts with growth, because growth is where the products live.
Income
What arrives whether or not the market cooperates — Social Security, pensions, guaranteed contracts — and how big the gap is between that and the life you intend to buy. The gap is the job.
Costs
The percentage fee that compounds against your largest balance. The tax bill riding inside your IRA. The years of care that can spend a life’s savings. Costs never send an invoice; they simply leave less.
Growth
Still necessary — thirty years of inflation is itself a cost, and only growth pays it. But every growth decision is a cost decision underneath: what a guarantee costs in upside, what volatility costs a portfolio being drawn down.
Six books. One idea. No sales pitch.
Each one is a fiduciary’s walk through a single room of retirement — the pros and the cons in the same paragraph, the arithmetic in the open, and the biggest cost in the room finally on the page.
The Flat Fee Revolution
The way you pay for advice may matter more than the advice itself.
About this book →
Is Your Annuity Any Good?
You already own it. Nobody ever showed you how to check it.
About this book →
Is an Annuity Right for You?
Guaranteed income sounds good. Here is how to weigh what it costs.
About this book →
Retirement Tax Planning
The IRS is a silent partner in your IRA. Plan the split, or it gets planned for you.
About this book →
Declining Health & Wealth Transfer
Two things destroy more retirement wealth than any bear market. Neither is in your portfolio.
About this book →
The Harsh Reality
Income. Costs. Growth. Remove the sales pitch and that is all that is left.
About this book →
Two lives in one, and a clean sheet of paper every time.
Bruce J. Smith III operated a nuclear power plant hundreds of feet under the ocean before he ever priced a retirement. He spent ten years selling financial products the way the industry teaches, and the next thirty as a fiduciary — every plan a one-off, custom built, with the price tag of that family’s retirement worked out on a clean sheet of paper.
Free lunches in school. Submarines in the Navy. A commercial pilot’s license, a ham radio call sign, and a garage full of cars he built himself. He says he has crammed two lives into one, and that the second one owes the first a debt: to give back what forty years inside personal finance taught him, before it is lost to time.
A short letter from inside a retirement plan, most weeks.
What a fee looks like in dollars over thirty years. What a widow’s first tax return looks like. What a surrender schedule actually says. One idea per letter, nothing for sale.