We think of retirement as a relaxing, carefree time in our lives when we can do whatever we please, but for many working Americans today, retirement will be more of a nightmare than a dream. Study after study has shown that many Americans are well behind where they should be in terms of retirement savings, […]
Waiting until the last minute is not usually a good idea, especially when it comes to filing your taxes. If you’ve put it off until the April 15 deadline — yep, that’s today — you’re not alone. As of Friday the IRS reported as many as 50 million taxpayers still hadn’t filed their tax returns. […]
Retirement can be a complicated topic. From translating all the complex financial jargon to understanding how much you should be saving for your golden years, it can sometimes feel like trying to learn a foreign language. And because finance isn’t always the most exciting topic to think about, many people simply aren’t very knowledgeable about […]
Transforming one’s personal finances is a complex process. While originally created for a different purpose, Dr. Mary Lippitt’s complex change management model is highly applicable to financial change. This particular change model illustrates each essential component of complex change and the problem that results when that component is missing. This makes it particularly useful in […]
No one lives forever. So why, 18 years into retirement, have individuals generally spent only 20% of their nest egg? Why, if people want to conserve their assets, do nearly half of Americans take Social Security benefits at the earliest possible age of 62 — receiving only about 70% of the full benefit available at […]
Make saving a cinch with these lesser-known tricks. Building an emergency fund, creating a nest egg for retirement and socking away money for your children’s college fund are fundamental steps to ensure long-term financial well-being. But how do you save money when you’re on a stringent budget? While it can be challenging to set money aside on […]
Retirement may mean different things to different people, but most agree on one thing. It should be stress-free. However, lack of stress usually comes from years of planning and decades of saving — which not everyone can do. The average savings balance in the U.S. is less than $60,000. Few people can depend on pensions. Baby boomers […]
With the growing number of proposals to increase taxes, its time to rethink how we save for retirement. Proposals to increase the top income tax rate, impose a new annual estate/wealth tax, and to tax unrealized capital gains, are not likely to pass this year. However, the odds are rising that by the time you retire, taxes will […]
The country is facing a retirement crisis, but some Americans are worse off than others. Workers in the top 20% of earnings distributions have half of all retirement wealth in both 1992 and 2010, compared with the bottom group, which saw its share fall from 3% to 1% between those years, a recent analysis at […]
Most of us probably know that we ought to be on top of our finances. In an ideal world, we’d all have a clear understanding of our expenses, how close we are to meeting our goals, and how we’re doing savings-wise. But in the actual world, a large chunk of younger adults are somewhat clueless […]
Google knows your money-saving woes. It’s financial literacy month, so search engine Google GOOG, +0.20% has released its list of the most-Googled personal finance questions, including the questions they get on saving money. The No. 1 “how to save for” question Google got over the past year (in the U.S. from March 2018 to March 2019): How to […]
“Pension detective” Ted Siedle, a former SEC lawyer who now runs Benchmark Financial Services, was awarded a record $78 million for blowing the whistle on JPMorgan Chase’s JPM, +0.84% failure to inform wealthy clients about conflicts of interest that drove the bank’s investment advice. Furthermore, Siedle’s firm has taken the lead in over $1 trillion […]
