Bookmark this page
Last week, the U.S. Treasury Department proposed changing Internal Revenue Service rules to make it easier for people saving for retirement — or actually living in retirement — to use some of the money in their 401(k)s to buy annuities that guarantee monthly payments until they die. These changes are a real retirement-planning boon. Here
I’m enamored with economic and political guru Dean Baker’s new book, “The End of Loser Liberalism.” In it, he advocates for — among many other things — letting all of us save for retirement in the federal Thrift Savings Plan, or TSP, which is the government’s answer to 401(k)s. Baker points out that 401(k) management
Any congressional assault on 401(k)s in the name of deficit reduction seems particularly shortsighted as 72 million baby boomers rush toward retirement without much savings. Talk about the potential for economic meltdown. Fidelity Investments, which manages 401(k)s for 11 million workers, recently surveyed them about their retirement planning and discovered that 55 percent wouldn’t be
To ensure financial peace of mind, you need to accumulate as much wealth as possible, right? The two ideas are inextricably entwined, I’ve always thought. But SunAmerica’s recent poll segregated the two concepts and asked people age 55 and older which of the two more closely described their financial goals. Most of them — 82
The disappearance of old-fashioned pensions is changing the way we think about retirement and how we pay for it. Prudential Retirement examined the financial impact of having a defined-contribution plan like a 401(k) compared to having a defined-benefit pension, which is the old-fashioned kind. I found Prudential’s conclusions troubling because they confirm the difficulty that
More than 300 readers posted a comment on the retirement planning blog I wrote about the government’s flirtation with the idea of taxing, or at least removing, the tax-advantaged status of retirement accounts, including 401(k)s. As you can probably guess, almost everybody was against it. However, many of the posts were thoughtful — and Congress
If you can’t find a job, consider creating your own. People ages 55 to 64 accounted for about one-quarter of new entrepreneurs in 2010, according to the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity. It’s a trend on the upswing. In 1996 — the first year the Kaufman Foundation did this survey – the over-55 crowd represented
If you’re one of the people whose retirement planning includes staying on the job past age 65 because you like to work, join the ever-growing club of people who just don’t don’t want to embrace retirement. The going wisdom is that the troubled economy is pushing people to work longer, but Gary Burtless, labor economist
