Retirement Watch Weekly
July 2015
July 31, 2015 04:25 p.m. Your Retirement Finance Week in Review Two events captured most of the attention this week. The first was China’s stock market indexes. The indexes peaked in mid-June after a year of gains around 100%. They quickly lost 30% from their peaks and attracted global attention. China’s authorities quickly took measures […]
Social Security, Inflation, and Interest Rates
Many people benefit from delaying their Social Security retirement benefits until at least full retirement age. Delaying until age 70 can be an even better deal. For years I’ve shown people how to calculate the difference using what I call the quick-and-dirty method. The method involves calculating how many years you need to live after […]
Strategies for Spending Your Nest Egg
The missing link in many retirement plans is the withdraw-al, distribution, or spending strategy. Accumulating for retirement is the easy part, and many people enter retirement with what seem to be adequate resources. Yet, a high percentage of Americans die owning their home equity and little more. Most rely heavily on Social Security to fund […]
Learning the Nuts and Bolts of Living Trusts for Estate Planning
Living Trusts are probably the most used way to avoid probate. They are mainstays of Estate Planning in states with expensive or time-consuming probate procedures. Last month we discussed the different ways of avoiding probate, including the advantages and disadvantages. This month we discuss the nuts and bolts of operating living trusts. In this discussion […]
Estate Planning for Your Digital Assets
Changes are afoot in how digital assets figure into your estate plan. For years, great uncertainty existed in the handling of digital assets such as accounts for email, social media, banking, investments, photo and data storage, web sites, and more. We last discussed these matters in our June 2014 visit, but already a major change […]
Owning Nontraditional IRA Investments
More and more IRA owners are considering investments other than traditional stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. It’s not surprising. The Federal Reserve’s zero interest rate policy boosted returns of stocks and bonds the last few years but probably pulled forward a lot of future returns into those years. For the next five or 10 years, […]
Protecting, Storing Your Digital Documents
Many financial services firms now recognize the importance of digital assets and want to be key players in storing them. A number of firms now offer digital storage services they often call “vaults” for digital documents. These are promoted as highly secure digital filing cabinets on which you can store digital copies of all your […]
The Elderly and Crime
Most discussions of the elderly and crime point out that the elderly are likely to be victims of crime than younger people are. But this article says that the new trend worldwide is for older people to commit crimes. The theory is that they haven’t saved enough for retirement and can’t keep regular jobs, so […]
