Review: The Good Retirement Guide

Nick Pensions & Benefits, Investing, Everything Else reviews, pensions, retirement 6 Comments

Today I am looking at The Good Retirement Guide, an annual guide published by Kogan Page. I bought the current 2021 edition, which was published last month.

The Good Retirement Guide 2021 is 318 pages long. The text is fairly dense but broken up by plenty of headings and bullet-point lists. There are 14 chapters and an alphabetical index at the back. The chapter titles are as follows:

1. Are You Looking Forward to Retirement?
2. Money and Budgeting
3. Pensions
4. Tax
5. Investment
6. Your Home
7. Leisure Activities
8. Starting Your Own Business
9. Looking for Paid Work
10. Voluntary Work
11. Health
12. Holidays
13. Caring for Elderly Parents
14. No-one is Immortal

The chapter titles are pretty self-explanatory. The book attempts to cover every aspect of making the most of your senior years. The style is clear and readable, and additional resources are signposted as appropriate.

In contrast with Sod 60! which I also reviewed recently, The Good Retirement Guide covers the financial aspects of later life in some detail. I thought the information about pensions and benefits in particular was very good and tells you most of what you need to know.

Some of the other chapters are a bit less comprehensive. The one on leisure activities, for example, lists various things you might like to do – or take up – in retirement, but the information is frequently sketchy and can verge on stating the obvious. Here is what it has to say about poetry, for example:

There is an increasing enthusiasm for poetry and poetry readings in clubs, pubs and other places of entertainment. Special local events may be advertised in your neighbourhood.

And apart from a mention for the Poetry Society and a link to their website, that is all you get on this subject 🙂

I don’t want to appear too harsh. Obviously in a wide-ranging book like this, it can be hard to judge the degree of detail appropriate to any particular topic. At least by mentioning a wide range of possibilities, the book may give you some ideas about activities you might like to pursue further in retirement.

The health-related content is a bit of a mixed bag. Some subjects are covered in reasonable depth, others less so. There is just half a page devoted to keeping fit, for example, with a further couple of paragraphs about yoga and Pilates. On the other hand, there is some good information (and advice) on health insurance, long-term care plans, and so forth. Again, this illustrates that the book’s primary focus is on the financial aspects of retirement.

One thing that did surprise me is that although this 2021 edition of The Good Retirement Guide was only published last month, there is no mention of the pandemic in it. You will search in vain for Coronavirus or Covid-19 in the index. I know there can be long lead times in publishing, but in an annual guide you might think they could have inserted a section about it somewhere. Maybe we will have to wait for the 2022 version?

Even so, a lot of the subjects discussed in the guide – holidays, for example – have been seriously impacted by the pandemic. The advice and procedures for travel abroad in particular may be very different even after the pandemic is officially over.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I thought The Good Retirement Guide 2021 was a helpful book for people approaching retirement. As I’ve said above, it has a strong emphasis on financial matters, and is well worth reading for that alone. Some of the other content is a bit hit-and-miss, and the surprising lack of any mention of the pandemic means that at times it reads like a guide to an alternate world where Covid never happened. Of course, none of us really knows what the ‘new normal’ will be in future. We can but hope it will be not too far removed from the old normal we remember and which this book – despite the 2021 in its title – basically depicts.

As always, if you have any thoughts or questions about this post, please do leave them below.

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