Retirement Money Secrets: A Financial Insider's Guide to Income Independence

Great book regarding a little known corner of the market.. I read this book in Jun 2025 and began putting it to work shortly thereafter. The author provides all the info needed to get you on your way. The book is written in an interview (actual new Client) format. The client asks many, many questions that are all easily answered and easily comprehended. I purchased the audiobook so I may have missed out on some of the charts and spreadsheets. No worries, the author takes his time and explains everything in easy to understand language... Great book!

I purchased the Kindle version of this book and read it in one day. I really liked the story-telling style and found Steve’s strategy and process clear and well spelled out.I’ve been involved with Closed End funds intermittently since the mid 1990s so they weren’t a new financial instrument to me. But Steve’s ideas really made sense to me and have lead me to reassess what I’ve been doing with my retirement funds.I especially liked his risk pyramid for different asset classes which has ,on the one hand given me a map for asset class deployment but also allowed me to asses my actual equity market risk, which I really appreciated.I am currently re-reading the book and creating a google doc of all the key points that I want to be able to easily review. The Kindle version makes this very easy to do.I’m also looking forward to joining Steve’s Facebook group to discuss some of the finer details on implementing his plan.In summary, this is a very good book with clear ideas and a well spelled out process.

This book is full of applicable advice. It is an easy read that provides motivation for a brighter future no matter how the market moves.

Imagine you're on vacation with your partner and meet another couple on the same tour. During your first social interaction, the man in this couple goes on at length about his investment philosophy, picks apart your investment style, lectures you, and is generally condescending and boorish. Yet, at the same time, the information he shares is good. That's this book. Literally. It's presented as a series of "conversations" with a poor, hapless couple who happened to sit down for some wine with the writer. On one hand, the conversational style makes the subject matter less dry than it might otherwise be, but it's still cringeworthy at many points.

Let me describe my reaction to the information presented in Steve Selengut’s book “Retirement Money Secrets, A Financial Insider’s Guide to Financial Money Secrets”: GOBSMACKED!I have been successfully investing on my own for decades. My investments have included mutual funds - both index and actively managed, individual stocks, ETFs, REITS, CEFs, bonds, T-bills, MM, and CDs. Now in my 6th year of early retirement (second time retiring early), and with one child in college and another in high school, I continue to read and participate in Facebook groups to learn how to safely juice up my returns without having to dip into my principle to pay the bills while inflation raises grocery, gas, restaurant, rent, and used and new car prices. And in Florida, the cost of homeowner’s and auto insurance is exorbitant.I saw the title of Steve’s book “Retirement Money Secrets” in a Facebook investing group and I laughed. Secrets, indeed! To say I was skeptical is a gross understatement. We’ve all seen the ads spouting so-called financial “secrets” only to discover it’s just a sales pitch to appeal to your sense of missing out if you don’t hurry and buy this investing program at a huge discount for one day only! That’s what I expected. But several people in my FB group had read it and recommended it so I looked it up on Amazon and read those reviews, which are also positive. I bought the book.Wow! Steve’s book turns conventional investing wisdom on its head! It totally blows away the old market value, total return, DCA (dollar cost averaging) buy and hold forever, and the 4% withdrawal rate mantra rinsed and repeated throughout my - and I’m sure your - investing history.Steve presents, in an engaging, conversational tone, very easy to understand guiding principles to invest in closed end funds (CEFs) for income. In fact, he shows how INCOME is the sole focus of CEFs, which is great for those approaching retirement or in retirement. You can also use his approach even if you have a long timeline till retirement. Did you know that CEFs have been around for 30 years before mutual funds? But CEFs get a bad rep for having high fees, which is anathema to low-fee only, DCA, buy and hold investors like me. Steve points out that the fees never come out of an investor’s account. The stated yield percent is NET the fees charged to the fund. And because these are managed funds, they have higher fees than passive index funds. So if the fees are 2.5% and the yield is 9% - you still receive 9%. The fees were already taken into account.There are several more points in the book that differ from conventional thinking, but you can easily see how investing in CEFs the way Steve suggests can create much more income and working capital in a shorter amount of time than investing the usual way.I don’t typically write in books, yet the information in this book is so profound that I immediately got out a pen and highlighter and began making notes in the margins and highlighting sections that I want to come back to. I’m going to read some sections again and take more notes so I can begin investing in CEFs with so much more knowledge about them than before I read the book. Do yourself a big financial favor and buy this book. Read it. Study it. See if it works for you.