The Retirement Handshake: A Minority Partner Who Changed the Terms and Is Greedy for More

By Mike Milligan

The day you signed your first 401(k), TSP, 403(B) or 457 enrollment form, you took on a business partner. You just did not know it.

They put up the tax break. You put up the labor. And they reserved the right to set the rate later, on a schedule and at a percentage you cannot know in advance. The partner is the Internal Revenue Service, and the partner is patient.

For thirty or forty years, the arrangement works beautifully. You defer, the market compounds, the balance grows. Then the paycheck stops, and everything about the deal changes at once. Required withdrawals begin at 73. Your Social Security gets taxed. Your Medicare premiums go up. And whatever you do not settle in life gets settled by your kids, at their tax rate, on their timeline.

The good news? The partnership has a buyout window. Most Americans never learn where it is until it is too late.

In The Retirement Handshake, Mike Milligan walks you through: How Congress has rewritten the retirement rulebook since ERISA in 1974, and why the $40 trillion national debt tells you which way the rate is going nextThe ripple effects that quietly tax your Social Security and raise your Medicare premiums after age 65The six-move plan that turns retirement taxes from an accident into a strategyA Negotiation Checklist that puts your name on the deal before December 31Read the contract. Then walk into the boardroom and rewrite it, while you still hold the pen.

From the author of The One of a Kind Financial Plan, Retirement Deja Vu, and Retirement CHI.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HHYYXSNF
• ISBN13: 9798171966614
• Release Date: September 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 114 Pages
• Weight: 0.31 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.5" x 8.5"