Retirement Blog

As of 10 days ago, 66 percent of Fidelity Investments, more than 500,000 IRA customers, who are required by the IRS to take minimum distributions from their retirement accounts for tax year 2011 have not yet taken the full amount. About 55 percent haven’t taken any. Fidelity blames this oversight on market volatility and confusion

I took my first newspaper job 39 years ago this week — hired sight unseen by the city editor for the Sun Sentinel and now-defunct Fort Lauderdale News on the recommendation of a professor at The Ohio State University. One of my first assignments was interviewing everybody in the Fort Lauderdale area who turned 100.

Olympic Gold Medalist Wendy Boglioli, who competed in the 1976 Montreal games and won a gold and a bronze in swimming, has been a spokesperson for long-term care insurer Genworth for the last seven years. At 57, the daughter of a 91-year-old mother, Boglioli speaks from experience. Last year when I talked to Boglioli, she

The financial industry seems bent on shaming Americans about their retirement readiness — or lack thereof. About a half-dozen new retirement surveys were released this week alone. Fellow retirement blogger Jennie Phipps wrote about one by Ameriprise Financial yesterday and another by Wells Fargo on Wednesday, the latter of which revealed that a quarter of

Where you live appears to have some influence on how prepared you feel for retirement. For the second year in a row, Ameriprise Financial surveyed people in the 30 largest metropolitan areas and concluded that overall they are feeling significantly less confident about retirement than they did a year ago. The survey measured: Likelihood consumers

It looks like retirement is no longer all about sea cruises and rocking on the porch. According to new retirement planning research released today, most people think their last decade or two will be spent on the job. About 25 percent of people between the ages of 25 and 75 with household income under $100,000

Here’s an unsettling retirement planning thought. With our own children grown or nearly grown, we may think that our responsibilities have ended for seeing that the school systems are successfully educating young children and high schools are turning out graduates who are prepared for work or further training. But Nicole Smith, senior economist at the

If you’re feeling nervous about investing your retirement savings in this unstable investment environment, Jerry Golden, who is an actuary as well as a registered investment adviser, thinks you should calm down. He advises people doing retirement planning to remember they are going to get Social Security, and “Social Security is one of very few

I live in a little town in Michigan, which has been hard hit by the state’s economic problems, making retirement planning a crap shoot for some of its residents. When I went to vote last week, the mayor, who was up for election but running unopposed because nobody wants the job, was standing outside the

Got a question or complaint about your workplace retirement plan (or, for that matter, your health plan)? Now you can go to a new consumer assistance Web page, compliments of the Department of Labor’s Employee Benefits Security Administration, or EBSA, and get a reply within three days. Hopefully, it won’t be an automated response like,