Retirement Watch Weekly
Diving Into the Medicare Data
Recently the Center for Medicare and Medicaid released a bunch of data that various people have been pouring through. Here’s an interesting post pointing out how much Medicare paid for chiropractic treatments and asserting all this is wasted money. I’ve never had a chiropractic treatment, but I know people who have. They say it works, […]
U.K. Government Helps with Retirement Planning
The U.K. government recently liberalized national pension rules to allow retirees to take their benefits in a lump sum instead of being required to take them as a life annuity. The latest move they’re considering is to tell people how long they are likely to live and will need their nest eggs to last. The […]
Why Most People Shouldn’t Manage Their Money
Each year the research firm Dalbar issues a study of how the returns investors actually earned differ from the returns of popular indexes. The firm measures flows in and out of mutual funds to see when people actually were holding shares of the funds and earning the market returns. The results always are dismal for […]
Everyone Needs an Estate Plan, and It’s Not About Taxes
Mickey Rooney passed away last week. He was a fabulously successful movie star in his prime and continued to perform most of his life. He was pitching products through infomercials the last few years. Yet, he apparently died with few assets to his name. This report alleges that he was abused and his money pilfered […]
Avoiding the Grandparent Scams
There’s a range of scams that specifically target grandparents. It’s not clear how the perpetrators find their information, but they have people’s names and numbers and the name of at least one grandchild. Then they call, pretending to be a grandchild in distress and in need of money. You can find details here, including what […]
Where Medicare Dollars Go
As the Center for Medicare and Medicaid has become more open with data, we’ve learned more about government medical spending. A few years ago we learned that treatments for what appear to be the same conditions vary greatly around the country, as do the costs and the results. This week we learned that a small […]
8 Key Retirement Questions
Economist James Poterba of MIT, whom I’ve quoted in the past, recently made a presentation at a conference on the key questions everyone should ask before retirement. This post from Forbes reviews the questions and some information you should have before answering the questions. As for Social Security, it remains (at least this election year) […]
Paying the Reverse Mortgage
Most people know generally about reverse mortgages. But not much attention is paid to what happens at the end of a reverse mortgage. This story purports to tell the story, but it raises a lot of questions for me. A reverse mortgage allows a senior adult or couple to tap their home equity while remaining […]
