One of the most important assumptions you will make when planning for retirement is life expectancy. While we can reasonably estimate each of our retirement income sources and dollar amounts, a crucially important variable we don’t have is how long we’ll live: Therefore, you don’t know how long exactly your

When is the right time to retire? The answer to this, like every other decision you have to make in retirement, depends on your own personal needs and circumstances. The National Bureau of Economic Research found that “retirement improves both health and life satisfaction” but the age at which you

We sometimes are asked who a fixed indexed annuity might be a good choice for, versus who might be suited to a variable annuity. And to answer that question, our attention was drawn to a very simple article published by the Insurance Information Institute (Which you can read by clicking

A study from the Center For Retirement Research looked into the decline in wealth for late boomers, and explored what may have contributed to it: “The results show that two factors were at play – a shift in the population towards lower-wealth households and, more importantly, a weakening of the

When we think of retirement, we often focus on how much money we have in savings. We often forget that retirement doesn’t necessarily mean having to deplete our savings, it means creating a retirement income strategy off of those savings. Call us, we have some ideas that could allow you

You may have heard the adage “you only live once” as it applies to pursuing opportunities and taking risks. But what does this saying really mean? While we agree that “you only live once”, you could also take it to mean that you should think wisely and avoid mistakes.  Preparing

We found an article recently from AARP that might interest you. It referenced a “safety-first” approach, which is something we have always believed in. The idea is to cover all of your essential expenses with guaranteed sources of income, meaning sources like Social Security, pensions, and annuities that pay you

Whether you are approaching retirement age or are decades away, you need to be thinking about what the safest place is to keep your money. Too many times retirees are left empty-handed because they put all of their savings into a risky investment, or failed to ensure they had the

Remember to think about yourself in future terms. Many of us feel little connection to the person we’ll become years from now, and that can lead to shortsighted behavior that can actually hurt us in the long run. It’s certainly food for thought. Are you holding back on retirement savings

We often hear that the market is “up” or “down” and think that we’ve either made money (or lost out on making money) or that we’ve lost money. But “up” and “down” don’t have much tangible meaning to us, personally. When a stock broker tells you us “You’re doing great,

There has been an uptick in what regulators call “romance fraud.” This refers to a type of online deception where individuals create fake identities and develop fraudulent romantic or otherwise close relationships with unsuspecting people to exploit money out of them. Studies have been done to try to pinpoint when

“You can’t have your cake and eat it too.” Perhaps there’s more truth to this saying than we want to admit. This year has been tumultuous, with markets declining and interest rates increasing. Were we all soothsayers, we would be rich beyond our dreams. But we aren’t. And it’s disingenuous

We’ve spoken in the past about the benefits of saving money for retirement by having automatic transfers from your checking account into a savings account. But, what is often forgotten is that workplace retirement account when you leave one job and move on to another. If you leave a job,

One potential way to save money consistently is to arrange automatic transfers from your checking to your savings account on paydays. This idea can be also applied to RMDs as we get older. While we may be forced to take required minimum distributions out of qualified accounts, there are no

Sometimes it’s best to start with the basic steps when planning for retirement. Are you contributing enough to your 401(k) to get your company’s full employee match? Have you paid off any high-interest-rate debt you may be carrying? Eliminating a monthly credit card or auto loan with a high-interest payment

The five years before you retire and the next five after retirement are among the most important and vulnerable for a retiree’s savings. The reasoning is that, as you approach retirement, there are far fewer years left to correct or recover from a mistake. The consequence of a misstep during