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Next Steps: A Practical Guide to Planning for the Best Half of Your Life, offers step-by-step advice to help readers have a successful second half of life and avoid the potential pitfalls of the retirement years. Published Aug. 1, 2009, and co-authored with elder law attorney Jan Warner, it is an outgrowth of our nationally syndicated column NextSteps. The book is a comprehensive guide that explains how to put together a plan – backed by a supporting cast of professionals – that will help you secure your future and avoid costly mistakes.

Who needs to read this book? How about the 78 million Baby Boomers, not to mention approximately 36 million Americans aged 65 and older and 22 million caregivers, all grappling with the issues that face us later in life.

Next Steps, the book, is the most comprehensive book on the market today dealing with aging and retirement. From the opening chapter that explains how to put together the right team of advisors, through chapters on health care planning, divorce, and second and third marriages, to concluding chapters on burial disputes and planning for pets, Jan Warner and I treat most conceivable topics that one might face in later years.

Published by Quill Driver Books in Fresno, California, Next Steps: A Practical Guide to Planning for the Best Half of Your Life, is available in bookstores, including Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million. It can also be ordered online direct from the publisher, at amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com, and by phoning 1-800-345-4447. The cost is $14.95 (U.S.)

I won the 2005 Aging Awareness Media Award from the American Geriatrics Society. It's the AGS' second annual award "to a reporter whose distinguished work covers trends, events, and/or policies related to health in aging."