Book Review - Can I Retire Yet by Darrow Kirkpatrick

Can I Retire Yet?: How to Make the Biggest Financial Decision of the Rest of Your Life.  Paperback
by Darrow Kirkpatrick. Publisher: StructureByDesign; 274 pages

It would be a bit of an understatement to say that I wish I had had a chance to read this book seven years ago. Back then I went into an early retirement blindly ignorant of the math and risks of early retirement. Over the intervening years I have gone down a pretty long road by (among other things) reading books and research papers (a lot of them), looking at blogs, playing with calculators, talking with advisors, paying for good planning, paying for bad planning, financial modeling myself, building my own retirement tools and software and simulators from scratch, digging up and testing as much of the underlying math of retirement that I could stomach (and doing a little catch-up on some old math skills along the way), back-testing various investment and retirement models, and even engaging in some correspondence with a fair number of leading academic researchers and bloggers in the current world of retirement finance. Now, I think (I hope) I have a healthier sense of humility and respect for the risk I took which was quite a bit bigger than I realized when I started. This is something I could have achieved a little sooner with some of the help offered by Mr. Kirkpatrick in his new book. In the end, I find that many of my own self-realized conclusions and what Mr. Kirpatrick offers in the book have a very, very significant overlap (not 100% but that's maybe a quibble beyond the domain of the book).

There are a lot of different resources that over the last 10+ years have tried to come at the complex and open ended retirement problem from a lot of different directions with varying degrees of success and clarity and conflict-free-ness, people from journalists-commentators to academic researchers to financial advisors and practitioners to self-taught and well-informed retirees. Here are some examples I can think of off the top of my head that I have encountered recently:

• Journalists/commentators: Jane Bryant Quinn 
• Academics/researchers: Wade Pfau, David Blanchett, Moshe Milevskey, Michael Finke 
• Practitioners: Michael Kitces, Joe Tomlinson, major advisory firms, etc. 
• Well Informed Retirees: Darrow Kirkpatrick, Dirk Cotton, Ken Steiner, Mr. Money Mustache, etc. 

All of these (and more) are really great sources for insight on retirement, of course. I pay particular attention to the last category, however. The men and women that are in this last group have "skin in the game" and personally know the real experience of a human being living inside a risky retirement. It's all about trust and I tend to trust someone that is working through the same issues I am especially when they have their family's future at risk. Sure, there are books to sell and blogs to pitch but "Can I Retire Yet" is a book I trust. It is both common sense and real lived experience with a partially visible supporting layer of high quality quantitative thinking and analysis that does not overwhelm the common sense.

The fuzzy truth on retirement math, as I have come to understand it, and as the book confirms for me, is that: "…no matter how many numbers you throw at the decision, you and an advisor will ultimately be making a gut determination based on numerical probabilities, personal values, and what you want out of life (p 169)." I can think of no better companion on the first leg of that journey than "Can I Retire Yet" especially for early retirees who have an entirely different road to follow (my opinion and page 13) than traditional retirees.