Category: Financial and taxes in retirement
March 16, 2021 -- If you turned 72 in 2020 or before, you probably will have to take a Required Minimum Distribution (RMD) this year from your IRA and/or 401(k) type plans. That is unlike last year, when COVID relief in the SECURE Act gave everyone a pass on taking the RMD.
All of those years when you were deducting your 401(k) and IRA contributions from your pre-tax income, and enjoyed tax free accumulation of earnings and interest on those investments, come home to roost when you reach a certain age. The law requires that you take an RMD from those retirement funds by a percentage that grows every year. Every cent of those withdrawals is considered taxable as ordinary income. Inherited IRAs and 401(k)s have different rules. Roth IRAs generally do not require RMDs.
The age at which you must start taking your first RMD has changed. If you turned 70 ½ in 2019 or earlier, you need to have taken your first RMD by April 1 of the year after that, and keep making them for the rest of your life. If your 70th birthday is July 1, 2019 or later, you do not have to take withdrawals until you reach age 72 (first one by April 1 of the following year and Dec. 31 thereafter). The idea for pushing out the requirement by 1½ years is to help retirees accumulate more savings before they have to start withdrawing them. Note if you delay the first one until April 1 the next one has to be paid by December 31. There is currently a bipartisan bill in congress that would extend the age when you have to take your first distribution to 75.
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Published on March 15, 2021
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Category: Best Retirement Towns and States
March 14, 2021 -- One thing about Florida, it's bigger than you think. Google Maps, which assumes no one ever has to stop for gas or a health break, figures it takes 12 hours and 20 minutes to drive from Pensacola to Key West. Looking for a great Florida place to retire on that trip takes you through many very different areas. Today we will travel to Florida's Atlantic Coast, which is loaded with best places to retire. Our tour will start north and move south. See list of our other regional retirement tours at end.
The east coast of Florida, which runs from the Georgia border and ends in Key West, is fairly uniform. Most towns here have two components: a barrier island with a beach town, and the main town and bigger residential developments located across a causeway on the mainland. Its many bays and inlets provide great boating and waterfront living. It is very flat and very low; coastal flooding is here and it is getting worse.
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Published on March 13, 2021
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Category: Retirement Planning
March 9, 2021 -- It is a perennial question that affects just about everyone - when is the best time to retire? Sometimes one has no choice in the matter, such as airline pilots or military personnel who reach a maximum age or length of service. Others are laid off from a job in one's late 50's or 60's, before they wanted to stop working. Fortunately many of us get to choose when we retire. But answering that question is never easy.
Our friend Robert Powell just wrote a fabulous article on "What Is the Right Age to Retire". He outlines the major questions that need to be answered, which we will touch on here and add a few of our own.
Are you ready to FIRE?
The FIRE movement (Financial Independence Retire Early) has many adherents. They are mainly people who want to quit working as soon as they can, and they take amazing steps to save enough money to do that. It has its pitfalls and its triumphs, but it is clearly not for everyone. Certainly amassing enough money to be able to retire is a comfortable place to be. Whether you believe in FIRE or not, if you won't have enough money to live on comfortably, you are not at the right age to retire.
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Published on March 8, 2021
Comments 30
Category: Health and Wellness Issues
March 6, 2021 — Thanks to the 300 people who took our Covid Vaccine Survey. Everyone in this community is in your debt for the few moments you donated to let us know about your vaccination trials and successes. Here are the results of the survey, with several surprises mixed…
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Published on March 7, 2021
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Category: Retirement 101 Course
March 3, 2021 — The problem with retirement is that there really isn’t a school for it. One day you are working, and the next day you could have twenty or even thirty years ahead of you with no plan as to how and where you are going to fill…
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Published on March 3, 2021
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Category: Health and Wellness Issues
February 25, 2021 – By now most of the Topretirements audience has probably had a chance to get at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine. Please take our quick survey of how that experience went for you. There are just a few questions on how you found out where…
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Published on February 25, 2021
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Category: Active adult communities
February 23, 2021 -- Want to know the active adult and 55+ communities Topretirements visitors are interested in learning about? We sure do, so we went through our user logs for the last 12 months, using them to identify the retirement communities that received the most online visits on this site. You will find the top 20 below - with many surprises mixed in with some sure things. Best of all, it is an interesting list with communities of all types from all over the country. That makes us happy, because it just not the same names all over again. Instead, there are many new communities for people to consider. Two of the winners are advertisers on this site, the rest are not.
Top 20 Active Communities for 2021
The Villages - Central Florida. Just about everybody has about this giant community. It spans 3 counties, has of over 120,000 residents, virtually every kind of amenity, and hundreds of clubs. 2000
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Published on February 22, 2021
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Category: Baby Boomer Retirement Issues
February 22, 2021 -- Seventy five years ago last summer GIs from America and around the world starting returning home after fighting WWII. It didn't take them long to resume normal life, where they quickly produced a wave of newborns the likes of which had never been seen before - the baby boom. Fast forward to 2021, where we are beginning to celebrate the seventy-fifth birthdays of that first crop of baby boomers. Happy birthday everybody.
We don't know what it was like in your elementary school classrooms, but in ours the impact of the baby boom was immediate and obvious. Our older sisters, created on shore leave, arrived in 1944 and 1945. Their classrooms had half the number of pupils of our 1946 born brother, and every other class after that. Our classrooms were jammed with kids.
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Published on February 21, 2021
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Category: Best Retirement Towns and States
February 16, 2021 -- Last week on this Blog we posed the question, "How Much Is Enough for Retirement". So when we came across this new study on the cheapest and most expensive places to retire from NetCredit, it seemed like the perfect follow-up.
As most retirees in the US or UK are figuring out, retiring in their own country means they are going to need over half a million dollars in the bank to do it comfortably. If that sounds unreasonable, then retiring abroad might be the next best option. NetCredit's new study crunched the numbers to find out what it would cost to retire comfortably in (almost) every country around the world.
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Published on February 15, 2021
Comments 5
Category: Best Retirement Towns and States
February 15, 2021 — By far the two most popular states for retirement are Arizona and Florida. Choosing between them can be hard, there are so many factors to consider. Both have warm winters in most of the state, but beyond that the field is open. Many people in the…
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Published on February 14, 2021
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