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Harvested: Covered Calls and Cash-Secured Puts for Retirement Income

A Conservative Income Strategy for Retirees — Including How to Run It in Your IRA and Roth IRA

You spent a lifetime building the nest egg. Now it has to pay you — and that changes everything.

For the ownership route to the same question, see Built, on dividend investing for retirement income.

For forty years, a bad year in the market was something you could shrug off and wait out. In retirement, it isn't. A downturn now means selling shares you'd rather keep, at prices you'd rather not accept, just to fund the income you need. There has to be a calmer way to draw a paycheck from what you've already built.

There is — and it is not the "options trading" you've been warned about your whole life.

Harvested teaches the two most retirement-friendly income strategies in all of investing — covered calls and cash-secured puts — in plain, patient language written for retirees, not day traders. No leverage. No naked risk. No four-decimal Greeks. No get-rich-by-Friday fantasy. Just a craft you can learn from the ground up and run for the rest of your life, collecting a steady premium in exchange for the patience you already have. You don't learn to gamble. You learn to be the house.

Inside, you will learn how to:

  • Earn rent on stocks you already own — and keep collecting it in good markets and bad
  • Get paid to buy quality companies at prices you would actually welcome
  • Braid both strategies into one simple income engine — "the Wheel" — that runs in well under an hour a week
  • Run the whole system inside an IRA or Roth IRA, where the rules quietly enforce the safe, fully-funded discipline for you
  • Choose strikes and expirations with a simple framework, no jargon required
  • Meet a falling market, a called-away stock, and an assignment calmly — because you decided your response in advance

What sets this book apart is its honesty. It will not promise to make you rich, because it can't, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. Every strategy's catch is named as plainly as its reward. You will learn to expect a realistic range of returns, anchored to decades of real benchmark history — never a single magic number. Every worked example uses real, dated market prices, the dull months alongside the good ones. The honest goal is quieter and, in retirement, worth far more than a windfall: steady income, softened drawdowns, and a portfolio that stops keeping you up at night.

This book is for you if you are a retiree or conservative investor who owns stocks or funds, has always heard that options are dangerous, and wants a careful, capital-preservation-first way to turn what you already hold into reliable monthly income — without ever betting the farm.

From the author of The Options Strategy Series, taught the same way: one honest idea at a time, the risk named as clearly as the reward, written for the investor who wants to sleep at night.

Stop bracing for the next bad day. Learn to harvest income from the market you already own — and earn the calm that comes with it.

Look inside

A few pages from the paperback. Select a page to see it full size.

  • The contents
  • The opening of Chapter 1
  • Figure 9.1: the Wheel, one full turn
  • Figure 10.3: win small often, lose big rarely

Who it's for

Retirees and conservative investors who own stocks or funds, have always heard that options are dangerous, and want a careful, capital-preservation-first way to turn what they hold into monthly income.

Try the free Covered Call Calculator and Cash-Secured Put Calculator.

Where to go next

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