Retirement Blog

A new report on “Retirement Income Adequacy” released by the Employee Benefit Research Institute says, among other things, that nearly one-half of baby boomers between the ages of 56 and 62 are at risk of running short of money during retirement. Yup, I’m at risk despite all my best retirement planning efforts. Desperate times call

The annual report on the health of Social Security and Medicare was released today and the news was so-so, especially for younger people who are concerned about retirement planning. Medicare, which serves 46 million retirees and people with disabilities, will continue to be able to pay the bills — thanks to health care reform – until

When I was 25 years old, I was way too busy thinking about beer and boys to worry about retiring. But the world and retirement planning have apparently changed. The Canadian-based market research firm Ipsos.com, found that 46 percent of young adults between the ages of 25 and 34 are already concerned about not having enough

If you don’t have a will, now’s the time to make one. The U.S. Senate has been fiddling over the federal estate tax for the last year. Because they have been unable to act, the existing estate tax expired. This year there is no estate tax, but next year the estate tax is scheduled to

If you were born in 1947, Social Security has bad news for you and your retirement planning. Because of a peculiarity in the way Social Security is calculated, you are going to be shorted thousands of dollars’ worth of  retirement benefits — unless Congress fixes the new “notch.” Here’s the deal: According to the Center

We’re not the only country in the world struggling with retirement planning and facing a dilemma over how to fund programs like Social Security. Britain announced Friday that it would eliminate mandatory retirement at 65. The government said that the change was designed to give people more choice, but cynics pointed out that in January

Have you ever dealt with a broker who foiled your retirement plans? Now’s your chance to tell an authority that is willing to listen. The Securities and Exchange Commission is soliciting public comments to evaluate whether broker-dealers should be held to the same standard as investment advisers. If you’re not aware that they are held

My brother-in-law, who retired this month, called my accountant husband last night with a retirement planning question. He wanted to know whether to roll over his 401(k) into an individually managed IRA — or leave it with his former employer. My brother-in-law is a union member who took early retirement from a major communications corporation.

The National Council on Aging says that most older Americans don’t understand health reform or how it will affect them. In recent research, the organization found that only 17 percent could correctly answer half of the factual questions about health care reform that the study posed. A key aspect of retirement planning is figuring out

One of the characteristics that separate boomers and their retirement planning from that of generations older than they are and the Gen Xers that follow is the experience of having done everything throughout their lives in a crowd. In my case, there were 50 kids in my elementary school classes and 60,000 students on the main