How To Stretch Your Retirement Dollar

John Spiropoulos, the Emmy-award winning reporter who hosted How to Pay for College (reviewed in our May-June 1993 issue) is joined by financial writer Peter Weaver in this fast-paced guide to money management in the golden years. The program covers a veritable wealth of topics: inflation, senior discounts, stocks, mutual funds, annuities, social security, returning to work, taxes, selling one's home, reverse mortgages, savings bonds, life insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, long-term care, wills, trusts, and more. Too much more, as a matter of fact. Set up like a news report--Spiropoulous and Weaver play the "over to you, John/Peter" ping-pong game at high speed--the program also has the depth we expect to find in a news report: surface. While there are a handful of good tips here for the viewer who's willing to do a lot of rewinding and replaying, as well as study the accompanying 116-page manual, most will be buried by the avalanche of topics, which just can't be covered halfway adequately in 2-minute clips. Too, some of the limited time is squandered: devoting about 4 minutes to what seniors with million-dollar plus estates should do seems silly. These people hardly represent the majority of seniors. Not a necessary purchase. (Available from: SelectVideo Publishing, 7200 Dry Creek Rd., Suite E205, Englewood, CO 80112; (800) 742-1455.)