Ideas to help preserve and grow your money
First, SECURE is the acronym for Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement. Someone stayed awake nights coming up with all that. Second, it’s an attempt to bring the federal regulations about money saved for retirement purposes further into the 21st Century. Too many Americans are grossly unprepared for retirement and many that are prepared …
Continue reading What is the pending SECURE Act from Congress?
Our existing Social Security system lives comfortably in the capitalist economic model we have here in the US. We can agree it has flaws which need to be addressed from time to time. The current flaw is that without some changes, it won’t be able to provide the financial safety net for older Americans that …
Continue reading Can We, and/or Should We, Fix Social Security?
I’ve blogged before about the cost of healthcare in this country and how it compares with other industrialized nations across the planet. Of the top 25 such countries, we rank in the bottom 20% in terms of healthcare outcomes (longevity) and what we pay to achieve that dubious distinction. And our longevity numbers have dropped …
Some of you will have heard me talk about the three phases of retirement. What I call the GO-GO Years, the SLO-GO Years, and finally, if you make it that far, the No-GO Years. There are going to be valid reasons to want to spend more money right after you retire. At the same time, …
My comments: The American Social Security system is designed, among other things, to keep older folks from having to sleep in the streets. As a child in 1950, I spent two years in India, courtesy of my father’s company who sent him there to train locals in the use of American made machinery provided to …
Continue reading 10 Interesting Statistics About Social Security
When I started my professional life in financial services, the world was a very different place. My first license gave me permission to talk about and get paid for selling life insurance policies. Here I am today, in my later years, almost fully retired, and only yesterday I received a call from an old friend, …
Not to make too fine a point about this, but I don’t want that to be my fate. But it very well might be. I’ve talked about the three phases of retirement: the GO-GO years, the SLO-GO years and the NO-GO years. My mother had Alzheimer’s and lived in a nursing home for the last …
Some of us are organized and some of us are not and the rest of us are 'sorta/kinda' organized. I’m in the 'sorta/kinda' organized group. I am, however, heavily invested these days in teaching others a process to follow when thinking about their future retirement. I’ve created an internet school called Successful Retirement Secrets™ where …
According the AARP, about 10,000 Americans turn 70½ every day of the year. If you’re in that group, and have money parked somewhere that you’ve identified as a retirement account, chances are you’ll have to start taking a RMD soon. First, a little background info. We’ve agreed that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is responsible …
Continue reading A Few Things to Know About Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs)
A much maligned financial planning tool is the reverse mortgage. And there is good reason why it had a bad reputation. Notice I use the word ‘had’. My position today is there is no reason to simply walk away because of that reputation. It no longer applies. First, a little background. When buying a house …
Continue reading Reverse Mortgages and Retirement – Part One
Helping Define Your Financial Future 