Retirement Watch Weekly
Investing Education for Grandkids
Recently, when I was the guest on a radio show, the host asked where young people learn about money, investments, and personal finance. Schools are too busy with diversity training and sex education to teach personal finance. Even at the college level practical money management is scarce. Many parents, especially, the Boomers, try to keep […]
How to Manage Retirement Spending Cycles
Most retirement plans assume spending at a steady rate throughout retirement. That might have been a good idea when retirement lasted only five to 10 years, but today’s retirement is a very different case. Spending is not steady in retirement. This is not a small point. A plan that assumes steady spending in retirement might […]
Instruction Letters and Ethical Wills
The typical estate plan is a collection of legal documents with sterile discussions of trusts and property distributions. It need not be that way. Your estate plan and your legacy can be enhanced by adding to your plan documents that are more personalized and speak directly to your loved ones. Certainly the main focus of […]
Strategies to Pay for Long-Term Care
Are consumers doing the right thing by not purchasing long-term care insurance? Insurers long have been frustrated by the small number of people purchasing LTC insurance. Though more people enter the target age group for the policies, few buy. In 2004, 326,000 new policies worth $700 million were sold. That was a 25% decline from […]
The New Breed of Vacation Homes
A vacation home is passé for some people. While vacation and second home owner-ship are on the rise, and more Boomers plan to buy second homes, a number of people are moving on to what they consider the next level of second home ownership. This innovation is known generically as the destination club. There now […]
Five Proven Ways to Reduce the Mortgage on your IRA
Most people who are busy accumulating large balances in their IRAs and 401(k)s forget that the IRS holds a mortgage on those accounts. You put pre-tax dollars in the accounts and let income and gains compound tax deferred. But that balance in the IRA is not all yours. The price for those tax breaks is […]
Survival Guide for Family Limited Partnerships
The family limited partnership has been widely-used in estate planning for years. The benefits are so significant that for almost as long the IRS has been trying to curtail the tax advantages of FLPs. While some of the IRS efforts have been successful, taxpayers also logged some victories. In addition, the IRS successes were in […]
Medicaid Nursing Home Rules Toughen
People who plan to have Medicaid pay for their nursing home care are in for some big surprises. A new law that has not received much publicity changes the rules. Medicaid is the program that pays the medical expenses of the nation’s poor. Medicare is the program that pays some medical expenses of older Americans. […]
