Retirement Watch Weekly
Avoiding Estate Planning Conflicts among Heirs
Most estate planners and their clients don’t focus enough on avoiding conflicts. I don’t mean the obvious conflict of leaving money to the estate planner or having a major beneficiary prepare the will. What’s more important are the ways an estate plan can create conflicts among the heirs or continue existing conflicts. Here’s a good […]
Retirees and State Taxes
How retirees are treated by states varies considerably. Some states that overall are high-tax states actually provide a lot of tax breaks for seniors and are low-tax states for them. But you have to stay on top of things. Many states are changing their tax policies in response to budget shortfalls, and some are removing […]
What the Super Rich Do Right, and Wrong
A new study obtained data from a firm that consolidates information on a number of superwealthy families (average net worth is $90 million) and tabulated their holdings and trades. You can find a summary here (subscription might be required). The good things the rich do is they don’t trade much, invest in vehicles open only […]
Evaluating Combination Long-Term Care Policies
Most people say their biggest fear in retirement is a need for long-term care that exhausts their savings. Yet, most people don’t have long-term care insurance. The biggest reasons given for not having LTCI is that it’s expensive and people are concerned about paying all the premiums and never claiming benefits. In response, insurers created […]
Safe Investments and Annuities — Another View
Many people are seeking safe investments and only safe investments. That’s understandable given the events since 2000 and how unprepared many people were for them. The interest in safe money certainly is helping annuity salespeople. Here’s an alternative view. Keep in mind that I regularly advise people use annuities in their retirement portfolios. But I […]
Help Figuring, Fighting Your Medical Bills
It shouldn’t have to be this way, but some people need to hire someone to figure out their medical bills and fight the charges. Medical bills are designed for the bureaucrats and computers at insurance companies, Medicare, and Medicaid, not for the actual consumers of medical care. So when a patient has care that isn’t […]
Bearish on Gold
That’s the view in an article on Bloomberg.com. It quotes a number of analysts about Gold’s recent plummet into a bear market and the potential for an end to its long streak of annual price increases. Gold’s a tricky investment. It’s still a fairly thin market, so the price can be moved by extra buying […]
Another Stock Market Myth Exposed
Part of my book Invest Like a Fox…Not Like a Hedgehog is devoted to teaching that there are a lot of market myths that are widely-held despite the lack of data to support them. Here’s evidence of one. Some people are worried about the stock market, because the sectors considered to be defensive have been […]
