I prefer to share insights with family, friends and neighbors from juicy nonfiction finance books, then offset these thrilling money sagas with plenty of movie-going and barbecues.

Retirement, saving and elder care top my list. I’m always on the lookout for simple, well-written books on parental-care issues, and I found two.

“Elder Care: What to Look For, What to Look Out For” (New Horizon Press, 209 pages, $14.95), by Thomas Cassidy, a former investigator for the New York State Attorney General’s Office, tells you how to vet assisted living, nursing homes and several financial subjects.

Julie Hall’s “The Boomer Burden: Dealing With Your Parents’ Lifetime Accumulation of Stuff” (Thomas Nelson, 228 pages, $14.99) starts out with dividing estates and provides helpful advice on clearing a lifetime’s worth of junk from your parents’ home.

This is a subject you will need a head start on because, as Hall notes, “80 percent of what we keep we never use and the average (American) household has 25 percent more furniture and 75 percent more things than they need.” Have you looked in your parents’ attic or basement lately? How about your own?

CLEAN OUT 401(K)

Speaking of clearing out junk, have you peered at your 401(k)?

It may be bursting with obnoxious fees and poorly returning funds that may hurt your retirement.

Daniel Solin’s “The Smartest 401(k) Book You’ll Ever Read” (Perigree, 228 pages, $14.99) will provide you with some boiled- down tips on how to get your 401(k) up to speed through diversification and lower costs.

Expenses always matter, and there’s a lot you can do to juice up your total return.

Here’s a nugget from the Solin book: “If your 401(k) plan does not give you the option to invest in at least three broad-based, low-cost index funds and a range of target retirement funds, it’s subpar.”

A good companion to Solin’s book is David Loeper’s “Stop the 401(k) Rip-off!” (Bridgeway, 196 pages, $15.95).

He targets excessive plan expenses and provides more than 90 pages of appendices that give you examples of how to identify and cut costs. It may be the most practical 401(k) book on the market.

FULL DISCLOSURE NEEDED

As often noted in this column, 401(k) plans don’t disclose all of their fees and the added expenses – mostly unnecessary – that devour your total return over time.

“Remember,” states Loeper, “even if you are in a very small company and your employer needs to pass on all or most of the cost of your plan, if you are paying more than 0.75 percent per year in expenses, it is probably excessive.”

An essential read is “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness” (Yale University Press, 293 pages, $26), an entertaining new book by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein.

The two University of Chicago professors examine what they call “choice architecture,” or the emerging science of how people can make better decisions.

The book isn’t only humorous, it’s loaded with good ideas that financial-service executives, policy makers, Wall Street mavens and all savers can use.

MAKING BETTER CHOICES

Fostering what they call “libertarian paternalism,” or making informed choices with a little outside guidance, the authors say the current U.S. mortgage mess could have been blunted if lenders had simplified disclosure, spelling out all fees and rate adjustments so that customers could easily understand and compare the loans. Amen to that.

While none of my recommended titles will give you much of a literary escape now, the information they offer will certainly help you plan for an endless summer. So don’t take any of my books to the beach. Take them home and to your office.

John F. Wasik, co-author of “iMoney,” is a Bloomberg News columnist.