Retirement Watch Weekly
Estate Planning for Small, Yet Important, Personal Items, Art and Collectibles
Small, personal items often cause the biggest Estate Planning problems. Those with experience handling estates know the worst disputes among heirs often are over what seem like trivial items. Even in a large estate, heirs might aggressively contest the disposition of a few pieces of furniture or personal mementos. Those small, personal items are most […]
Avoiding Financial Scams and Abuse
The world is rife with financial fraud and abuse, but many people don’t know enough about it, to their detriment. Even people who think they know the facts of financial fraud and abuse don’t, especially those most likely to suffer from it. You need to under-stand financial fraud and abuse, and then prepare and take […]
Making the Most of Home Equity in Retirement
Some of the biggest mistakes and lost opportunities in retirement finance involve the family residence. A home usually is among the most valuable assets on a family’s balance sheet and one of the largest sources of expenses. Yet, most retirement plans don’t give much consideration to the home and home equity, leaving a lot of […]
Roth Accounts: Not Only for the Young
Roth IRAs aren’t very old, but they al-ready spawned some rules of thumb. The most common rule of thumb for Roth IRA is that they’re for relatively younger people. Unfortunately, this rule of thumb is the result of some good research that is distorted and misapplied. It’s causing many people to not use Roth IRAs […]
New Rules for Rolling Over After-Tax 401(k)s
New IRS rules make it easier for higher-income workers to shift their money to Roth IRAs. The rules apply to people who make after-tax contributions to 401(k) plans. These are contributions that exceed the maximum allowed tax-deferred contribution. You can make contributions above the tax-deferred ceiling, but the excess can’t be excluded from gross income. […]
December 2014
December 19, 2014 04:28 p.m. Your Retirement Finance Week in Review I wish each of you a Merry Christmas. Since next week is shortened by the holiday and not much economic data will be released, I probably won’t be sending an e-mail next Friday. Central bankers gave investors an early Christmas present this week. The […]
Two Schools of Retirement Income
This post does a decent job of summarizing the two schools of retirement income planning, calling them the safety first approach and probability approach. It doesn’t cover the hybrid methods or ways of adjusting the approaches to individual situations. But it’s a good overview of the approaches and should help you decide which way might […]
A Look at the Highest Income Tax Returns
You can learn a lot from a summary of the 400 tax returns reporting the highest incomes. The IRS recently released those returns for 2010. The information is a little dated, but you still can learn a lot. The key takeaways are that the highest earners receive more than half their income for the year […]
