Category: Retirement Planning
August 5, 2014 - Note, this is the 3rd article in our series on how to avoid wrecking your retirement. The first 2 articles can be found in "Further Reading" below.
Retirement is hard enough without making a self-inflicted, hard to recover from mistake. To help you avoid that trauma we have searched through comments to our previous retirement surveys and the general literature for the
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Published on August 4, 2014
Comments 69
Category: Travel
Take a Hike!
By Jan Cullinane.
Editor's Note: Frequent contributor Jan Cullinane submitted this piece on her recent road trip to Utah and many of its National Parks. We thought it makes a nice "how-to" companion to our recent article: "Best Road Trips for Baby Boomers".
August 2, 2014 -- I live in a state with swaying palm trees, the second longest coastline (after Alaska), no state income tax, and a place that made the expression “hanging chads” popular. Yup, you guessed it - Florida. My husband and I love the warmth, glittering sea, and verdant greenery of the Sunshine State, but the mighty West, with its desert beauty and incredible rock formations beckoned. So, off we went in late June/early July on a ten-day trip to tour the “Big 5” national parks of Utah: Capitol Reef, Arches, Canyonlands, Zion, and Bryce Canyon. In addition, we visited Dead
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Published on August 2, 2014
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Category: Retirement Planning
July 28, 2014 -- Rich got our attention when he contacted us to suggest a city review for Ocean Shores, Washington. For one, we had never heard of this town. But more intriguing to us, he happened to mention that he had a 7 page analysis of how it stacks up to the criteria he found on Topretirements.com. That sounded pretty thorough to us. One thing led to another, and subsequently we had the pleasure of interviewing Rich about that analysis.
A Search for the Perfect Retirement Town
Rich and his wife, Jan, had lived in Washington State for 26 years early in their careers (1969 - 1995). Then they moved to Texas, where Rich
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Published on July 29, 2014
Comments 27
Category: Financial and taxes in retirement
July 28, 2014 -- Every year the 6 Trustees of the Medicare and Social Security trust funds issue a Report on the state of these 2 popular programs. This year the big news is favorable for the Medicare program - the year in which its Trust Funds are exhausted has been pushed back 4 years - to 2030. The good news is attributed to lower than expected inpatient hospital utilization, among other reasons, and represents a big change since last year's report.
Over in the world of Social Security the news is the same as last year - the combined Trust Fund for retirement and Disability depletion date
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Published on July 28, 2014
Comments 15
Category: Best Retirement Towns and States
July 22, 2014. Note: This is Part 2 of a series. Part 1 on retiring at the lake was published in 2011. This installment lists more great lake towns for retirement. We hope you will add your ideas for the best lake retirement spots in the Comments section.
In our recent survey on "where to live" preferences, living on the beach was the third most popular choice. Although we wished we had also provided a "lake" option, we guess that being near the beach and living on a lake are close to being interchangeable, although not exactly the same. If we had listed the lake
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Published on July 22, 2014
Comments 5
Category: Financial and taxes in retirement
Update Nov. 15, 2015: The Budget Bill signed into law in late 2015 dramatically changes the popular "File and Suspend" strategy discussed here. People who can take advantage of it by April 1, 2016 are grandfathered, but depending on your birth date, the strategy has gone away for other folks. See our article "How the New Social Security Claiming Rules Affect You" for more.
July 16, 2014 -- A recent story in MarketWatch by Robert Klein highlights a little known but interesting wrinkle to the "file and suspend" strategy for maximizing Social Security benefits. The wrinkle can result in a significant windfall of cash, which might be particularly useful if you contract a life-threatening illness before age 70.
For background, the file and suspend strategy is mainly taken to allow one spouse to collect the spousal benefit while the other spouse continues to accrue benefits past Full Retirement Age (age 66 to 67 for baby boomers). In this strategy one spouse
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Published on July 16, 2014
Comments 16
Category: Adventurous retirement
July 14, 2014 -- It's summertime and that means it must be time to plan a road trip - either for now or in the fall when the weather cools and traffic subsides. We are pretty sure that most baby boomers have a few routes on their personal bucket lists. In this article we will list 12 of our personal favorites to help you consider the possibilities. We also invite our members to suggest their "bests" in the Comments section below. You can subscribe to our free weekly newsletter to get more retirement ideas like this.
Types of great highways
You don't have to drive far to find a great road - just about everyone probably has a favorite highway in their own part of the country. One that is near us in Connecticut is
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Published on July 14, 2014
Comments 34
Category: International Retirement
By Billy and Akaisha Kaderli
Does living in the States just cost too much?
We realize that not everyone wants to own property even if they have the assets to do so. Some people might not want to tie up their net worth in real estate but they have cash flow upon which to live, perhaps to enjoy vacations and foreign travel. Maintaining a comfortable lifestyle in the States can be costly. You might still have a mortgage, there are home repairs and property taxes, the price for owning and maintaining a car is high, and don’t forget about dining out, groceries and entertainment costs. For a modest-yet-comfortable home life you can pay three to four thousand a month easily.
But what if there was an additional
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Published on July 1, 2014
Comments 4
Category: Financial and taxes in retirement
July 1, 2014 -- Congratulations on getting the kids through college. With today's out of control tuition costs, that was no easy task. And nice going with the retirement, we hope you get a hard-earned rest from a lifetime of work. The “Broke” part isn’t so good though, so here are 8 steps on how to help fix that.
Unfortunately you are not alone. It is estimated that
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Published on June 30, 2014
Comments 88
Category: Retirement Planning
June 24, 2014 -- Thanks to the over 1800 members who took the time to contribute their valuable insights to last week's "Where You'll Live" poll. We appreciate you sharing! As promised, here is a detailed report on the findings. At the end of this article you will also find a complete report of the more than 450 individual responses to question 11, "Do you have anything else you would like to share about your retirement living preferences and the reasons behind them?."
Highlights
Your input provides confirmation of many opinions we hold about retirement preferences in general, along with some surprises. For example, it is not much of a stretch to bet that most of you are interested in retiring to a warm weather clime, with the Southeast and Southwest at the top of your preferences. We did not expect to see the level of interest there was in a suburban environment. And we were blown away with
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Published on June 24, 2014
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