Retirement Watch Weekly
Understanding the Five-Year Waiting Period for Converted IRAs
The five-year waiting period for Roth IRAs causes some confusion, because the rules are confusing. For a distribution from a Roth IRA to be tax-free, it must be made after the later of the owner’s turning age 59½ and when the owner has had the Roth IRA for at least five years. For distributions from […]
Expanding the Roth IRA Opportunity
Roth IRAs remain one of the most neglected tax and financial planning opportunities. Even many of those who convert their traditional IRAs to Roths don’t take advantage of all the strategies available to maximize tax-free wealth. It’s understandable that people are slow to convert their traditional IRAs to Roths. There are many factors to evaluate […]
Breaking the 4% Retirement Spending Rule
JP Morgan joins us among those who criticize the 4% rule for determining retirement spending. While widely accepted among financial planners, the rule has various weaknesses. By using the rule methodically, retirees have a major risk of spending either too much or too little in retirement based on their circumstances. JP Morgan constructed a model […]
Where Does This Bull Market Rank?
Many people are worried about the stock market rally since 2009 because they say it’s gone on too long and has to reverse soon. May not. Bespoke Investments prepared a couples of tables of the longest and strongest bull markets. Looking only at the results, this bull market could continue for a while yet before […]
Coming Changes in Medicare/Medicare Advantage
More changes, none of them positive, are on the way for those enrolled in Medicare or Medicare Advantage. First are the broader changes that apply to all Medicare prescription drug beneficiaries. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid quietly released a proposal to limit the types of drugs that are protected under the program. Those in […]
The Best Stock Market Indicator?
Investors search for the ideal indicator or signal that tells them when to change their investment portfolios. Here’s the latest candidate, from the blog Philosophical Economics. It’s not a traditional market indicator at all and doesn’t even use any of the traditional stock market metrics. The indicator is the ratio of the total amount of […]
A New Scam: Fake Funeral E-mails
The most common e-mail and computer scams are designed to have you click on a link in the e-mail or an attachment to it. The result is malware downloaded to the computer. Malware might do a range of different things. It might give the scammers access to or information on your computer. Or it might […]
Retiring with Forbes – the Forbes Annual Retirement Guide
Forbes’ annual retirement guide is out. As usual, it contains a lot of sensible and innovative advice. Most major media retirement presentations contain basic, traditional information, a good deal of which is outdated. You don’t see that in the annual Forbes review. Of course, it’s not a comprehensive guide. It provides new ideas in certain […]
