For many small business owners, the business is their retirement plan. The plan is to sell the business at some point and then retire. The trouble is often in the timing. As an owner, when you want to sell may not be ...(more)
Kirsten is 25, recently graduated from college, recently married, and ready to embark on a working career that will span 40 or so years. She also has this habit of drinking a certain brand of pop (name withheld to ...(more)
Time for an investment quiz. You can choose from one of the following two hypothetical mutual funds. The Racy Fund gained 75% in 2010 but lost 45% in 2011. For the two years, its average return was 15%. The Boring Fund ...(more)
Conventional wisdom says that in retirement, you should take less risk with your investment portfolio, especially the older you get. There is some wisdom there, in a general sense. But as always, a person’s individual ...(more)
If you work for an employer that offers a 401k retirement plan, you may, at some point in your life, be tempted to borrow from that plan. Not all 401k plans offer a loan option, but if yours does, here are some points ...(more)
Though many of the risks we face in retirement are the same for both men and women, women do face some unique challenges as they age. The Society of Actuaries recently released a report titled “The Impact of Retirement ...(more)
When it comes to generating retirement income, conventional wisdom says to spend down/consume your taxable assets first, then your tax-deferred assets (like 401k and traditional IRAs), and then tax-free assets last ...(more)
The conventional wisdom in retirement planning is to never spend your principal once you’re retired. That would make good sense in many cases, except for that little collection of rules overseen by the IRS known as the ...(more)
Okay, apologies to Hamlet and Shakespeare. Converting a traditional IRA to a Roth IRA seems to be an ongoing topic of conversation. Why all the focus on converting traditional IRA money to Roth IRA money?
In its ...(more)
Inquiring retirees (or soon-to-be retirees) want to know: how much money can I safely take out of my savings? The trick is taking out enough to live on and maintain a decent standard of living, but not so much that you ...(more)
If your retirement savings took a hit during the 2008-2009 recession, you may just be wondering how long it will take you to catch up to where you were. Or at the least, you may want to know what you can do to speed up ...(more)
We all love guarantees. And when it comes to retirement, we especially like the idea of guaranteed lifetime income. After all, no one wants to run out of money before they run out of life.
There are only a few ...(more)
In the good ol’ days, having a pension was about as good as it gets for a retiree. Nowadays, even pensions aren’t guaranteed. Stockton, CA filed for bankruptcy this summer, and part of its restructuring plan included ...(more)
There’s a saying in business circles that runs like this: “That which gets measured, gets done.” I vaguely recall learning in some college course that researchers tracked a single variable in a factory setting to see ...(more)
The three most important retirement risks are paying for healthcare, paying for long-term care, and inflation, according to a 2011 survey released by the Society of Actuaries. Both retirees and pre-retirees ranked those ...(more)
First, my apologies to Shakespeare. But modifying one of his famous lines seems oh so appropriate given all the media hype over the stock market swoons here and abroad this summer. Will Greece will pull out of the ...(more)
If you contribute to a 401k retirement plan through your employer, you’re in for some good news this summer. The federal government will require 401k plans to do a much better, much clearer disclosure of just how much ...(more)
Okay, boosting your retirement income by 33-75% is rather a grandiose claim to make. Can it really be done, in a safe way? The answer is yes, and the vehicle is Social Security.
When it comes time to claiming Social ...(more)
Stock investors and bond investors alike leave a lot of money on the table. That’s the conclusion from another annual study by Dalbar, a Boston-based research firm. This year’s numbers confirm a long-running trend: ...(more)
If you ask airplane pilots, odds are most will say that takeoff and landing are the busiest parts of a flight. There are lots of variables to take into account to make a safe landing, such as wind speed, altitude, air ...(more)
