retirement
Taking Control of Yourself In Retirement
Retired life: it’s supposed to be a time for relaxation and doing the things that you really want to do instead of the things you need to do to sustain yourself and your family. Unfortunately, many around you might have…
Retirement Planning: Some Fundamentals to Think About
As the saying goes, time marches on. And as you think ahead to the retirement phase of your life, this marching becomes more and more evident as you watch the days count down to the time you’ll be taking the…
Gen X and Social Security: A Changing Landscape
A recent MetLife study, titled “Study on Gen X: The MTV Generation Moves Into Midlife,” concluded that the population group referred to as Generation X (those with birth years ranging from the early-to-mid 1960s to the early 1980s) have come…
Gallup: Financial Concerns Continuing to Plague Future Retirees
Nearly half of Americans tracked in Gallup’s random polling of over a thousand adults aged 18 and older expressed concern that “they won’t be financially comfortable when they retire.” Compared to a similar polling just after the turn of the…
Re-examining the 4% drawdown rule of thumb
It’s been around a long, long time, this assumption that CNBC once defined as “withdraw 4 percent a year, and you have excellent odds of having enough money for 30 golden years.” But now, with all that’s happened and happening…
Looking at Retirement as a “Life Segment”
Segmenting a lifetime into four primary phases (learning, growing, maturing, and exploring) can give one an entirely different view on what retirement is all about. Each of these four segments–about 8000 days in length–has a unique set of characteristics, as…
SSA Office Closings Intensify Public Concerns
Recently-announced plans to close Social Security Administration field offices in Arlington and Baltimore have shed new light on a wave of discontent among the elderly and those in need of on-site service from the agency. Washington Post reporter Patricia Sullivan,…
What’s So Critical About the Year 2030?
Most media folks writing about Social Security’s solvency problem point to 2035 as the crisis year–the year when the program’s trust funds run dry and benefit levels fall by potentially as mush as 25%. But there’s another key milestone in…
Thinking about retiring at 62? Here’s what that means.
It’s an attractive thought, bailing out at the first opportunity and grabbing your benefits. But while many folks focus only on the short-term benefit of cashing in those benefits, the longer term impact of higher benefits later is frequently overlooked.…
Getting the Most Out of Social Security: Some Tips
If you’ve spent any time thinking about Social Security and analyzing where and how it fits into your retirement financial strategy, you’re well-versed in the benefits of deferring benefits past age 62, as well as the longer-term advantage of collecting…