Retirement Blog

Today is Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday. His songs helped shape my life. I know exactly where I was when I first heard many of them. The lyrics still figure into how I look at the world. But I think it is time for Bob to quit touring. He never had a melodic voice — it

As part of our retirement planning, my husband and I are designing a new home. We’re including a couple of offices because I’ve worked from a home office for 15 years, and my husband contemplates working from home when he finally retires from his full-time job — if that ever happens. My husband will be

The British are considering a 140-pound weekly per person, flat-rate pension available at age 66 to almost all residents of the UK – you wouldn’t even have to be a citizen. It would replace a much more complicated retirement system that required 30 years of contributions and very unpopular means testing. If you convert 140 pounds to

By now you’ve heard that judgment day is at hand. The rapture is scheduled to unfold on Saturday, May 21. And with all the natural disasters and global political unrest we’ve had lately, it doesn’t seem so far-fetched. In preparation for this event, I have made no retirement planning changes whatsoever. In fact, I expect to

How much will the Great Recession affect your retirement? The answer is more than you might suspect. A joint study by the Urban Institute and the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College concluded that workers who were unemployed for many months accumulated fewer Social Security and employer-sponsored pension credits and were unlikely to have

My late mother-in-law used to keep her retirement savings in six different banks so that she never had more than the FDIC-insured limit in any one place. This daughter of the Great Depression never wanted to risk losing it all to financial crisis. I used to snicker about her money-management ideas, but these days her

The U.S. Supreme Court made one thing clear in yesterday’s Amara v. Cigna decision: Employees are on their own to understand what their pension paperwork actually says. In 1997 and 1998, Cigna, the Philadelphia-based insurance company, converted its traditional pension plan to a cash balance plan. It gave its employees a synopsis of the plan

The retirement planning Nervous Nellies among us are legion. Two more studies released today say once again, that boomers are nervous about retirement. The Society of Actuaries study reported that 58 percent of retirees and 71 percent of pre-retirees were concerned about the impact of inflation on the value of their savings and investments. MFS

For most of us, money saved in a 401(k) will provide a big portion of our retirement income. The Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI), a nonprofit think tank funded by financial services companies, held a seminar last week on the question, “Is There a Future for Retirement?” Much of the discussion centered on how to

If you work for a small business, it’s likely that you don’t have access to a workplace retirement plan. That’s especially true for those on the low end of the wage scale. On the other hand, if you’re lucky enough to be a key employee in a medical or law office that sponsors a defined