Retirement Watch Weekly
Retirement Breaks for Entrepreneurs
When your business is doing well, one way to save taxes at the last minute is to set up a retirement plan and make a deductible contribution. Often you can make the contribution after the year is over. There is a wide array of retirement plan options available to the self-employed. The trick is to […]
More Changes Coming to Medicare
Medicare beneficiaries have been through a series of changes in recent years, and more changes are coming next year.The changes aren’t all positive, so they were released quietly last Friday. The good news are in the Part D Prescription Drug program. The deductible is being decreased to $310 for 2014. That’s a 4.6% decline. The […]
Have You Paid for Government Retirement Benefits?
Ezra Klein of The Washington Post periodically writes provocative columns about Social Security and Medicare. One of his basic points is that seniors haven’t really paid for the benefits they’re expecting to receive during retirement. Most have paid less in Medicare payroll taxes than they’ll receive in benefits. For Social Security, it’s more of a […]
Trouble for Baby Boomers Retirees
Each generation in the U.S. has a higher standard of living than the previous generation. It isn’t always true from family to family, but as a nation that’s been the case. That trend is about to stop, according to a number of studies reviewed by The Washington Post. For many years there has been concern […]
Searching for the Next Stock Market Bubble
After being burned by tech stocks in the late 1990s and real estate and stocks again in the first decade of the 2000s, investors are trying to be alert for bubbles. This post argues that the way to spot a bubble is to follow the quantitative analysts and investors. He thinks he’s found the next […]
Does Warren Buffett Like Variable Annuities?
Berkshire-Hathaway, Buffett’s investment vehicle, recently entered into a deal with the insurer Cigna to reinsure some variable annuity guarantees of Cigna. No doubt this will be viewed as Buffett entering the annuity, especially the variable annuity, market and be used as a sales tool for variable annuities. Don’t fall for that line. There are a […]
A Few Words Against Investing in Gold
Gold investors generally give several reasons why they like the yellow metal. A new research report by a couple of serious researchers casts doubt on those reasons. Claude Erb, formerly of TCW, and Campbell Harvey, professor at Duke, took the five reasons people generally give for owning gold and tested gold’s historic performance against them. […]
Understanding Stock Market Returns
I don’t spend much attention to discussions in the financial media of stock market returns, especially forecasts of them. They’re so misbegotten it is almost comically. On those occasions when I find a good discussion of equity returns, I refer it to you. This piece from PIMCO explains how the fund firm analyses equity returns […]
