Your retirement planning should not be done in a vacuum. If you are married, you should definitely include your spouse in the process. You would be surprised at the number of couples who are blindsided by differences over retirement dreams, plans, and expectations. It is no wonder that the rate of divorce among couples fifty-five [...]
Archive | May, 2011
Traveling? Should you buy travel insurance?
Note: I originally published this article in the AARP Bulletin. Carla McDowell has always loved to travel. She’s toured the Soviet Union, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, South Korea, Costa Rica, England and Alaska. And like a growing number of Americans, she always purchases travel insurance. “No one wants to get sick and cancel a trip,” [...]
How do you define retirement?
Ask a thousand different people what retirement is to them and you will get a thousand different answers. Many associate retirement with a particular age (sixty-five) or work status (not working). Many define it with certain activities (travel). In reality, all those things can be used to describe certain individual’s retirements, but they don’t define retirement. [...]
Annual retirement review checklist
Retirement has a lot of moving parts and when you consider that it could last for thirty years or more, it should come as no surprise that it will have several distinct phases. Sixty-five will look different from seventy-five, which will look different than eighty-five. The world, your health, your finances, your responsibilities, and your [...]
Can you count on Social Security and Medicare?
Every year, the Social Security Board of Trustees reports to Congress on the fiscal health of the Social Security program. Not surprisingly, high unemployment and a wave of retiring baby boomers have put a heavy strain on the program. Benefits being paid already exceed tax revenues collected and in their 2011 report, the board estimated [...]
Markets
| S&P 500 | 1649.60 | ||
| NASDAQ | 3498.965 | ||
| Cboeinterestrate1 | 2.011 | ||
| Gold Dec 11 | 1561.50 | ||
| Crude Oil Jan 12 | 97.00 | ||
| Us Dollar Index F | 83.64 |
