Take Control of Your Financial Life
In a conversation recently I got the following question; “Do I need life insurance after I retire from Virginia Tech?” Now, this question is not specific to just Virginia Tech employees. Anyone who is within 10 years of retirement should be thinking about this.
My response, as is often the case, was “It depends”.
[Read more…] about Do I need life insurance after I retire from Virginia Tech?Small business recovery grants now available. Why so many people are unhappy in retirement. The stock market just had it’s best 100 day rally ever. No one is throwing a Zoom party.
From time to time when working with self-employed clients or those that have a side business, I find that the retirement plans they are using aren’t optimal. Sometimes they’ve outgrown the plan they started with. In other cases they didn’t know a better option existed. Whatever the situation, if you’re self-employed or do some freelance work and it’s been a while since you reviewed the options, you might find a better fit for your needs.
[Read more…] about Optimal retirement plans for the self-employed and side businesses
If you are in a High Deductible Health Insurance Plan (HDHP), you have access to one of the best retirement savings vehicles available today, the Health Savings Account. Yes, you read that correctly, in my opinion, your Health Savings Account, or HSA, is best thought of as a retirement account. [Read more…] about The HSA as a Retirement Account
One of the most valuable assets retirees have are their Social Security benefits. Depending on an individual’s longevity and income over their career, Social Security payments could ultimately total upwards of $1,000,000. Unfortunately, based on my experience, many people haven’t given much thought as to how they can maximize this benefit. And because of how Social Security is coordinated for a married couple, poor planning can potentially result in several hundred thousand dollars of lost benefits over a lifetime.
[Read more…] about Social Security Strategies for Married Couples
I get some variation of this question on a regular basis and it usually falls into one of 2 scenarios. The first is when someone is getting ready to retire. 
The other is when a mid-career family is buying a new home, thinking about refinancing, or has just come into some additional money, say from a promotion or inheritance. For the sake of brevity, I’ll cover the first scenario here and the other in a future post. [Read more…] about Should We Pay Our Mortgage Off Early?
When reviewing investment alternatives, average annualized returns are important, but they don’t tell the whole story. The sequence of returns matter as well. And as we’ll see, while they can have an impact when accumulating savings, their effects can be more dramatic for portfolios in distribution, such as during retirement. [Read more…] about Sequence of Returns – A Key Aspect of Investment Performance
When Chrystal and I got married, I soon realized there were some activities I thought I had long mastered but had actually been doing wrong. A case in point was loading the dishwasher. B.C. (Before Chrystal), I thought that if the dishes came out clean, the dishwasher had been properly loaded. After we got married, I found there was another criteria just as important as dish cleanliness – Her satisfaction that it had been loaded correctly. [Read more…] about Washing Dishes and Retirement Withdrawals