What Happens to Your Pension If Your Former Employer Goes Bankrupt?

Pensions, along with Social Security, are the core of most people’s reliable income in retirement – they’re what many people plan to live off of, or at least use to cover their most essential expenses. If you’re receiving a pension, or have one coming, you’ve probably contributed to your pension fund for years, maybe decades, […]
4 Steps To Prepare Your Retirement Portfolio For The New Year

The end of the year is a great time to get your financial house in order. As the market bounces along throughout the year, your portfolio bounces right along with it. Every once in a while, you need to give it a checkup. And it’s not just rebalancing your investment portfolio (though I cover that in step 4) – you need to make sure your entire financial picture is in good working order.
How Much Wealth Will You Have 30 Years Into Retirement?

Thus far, we have compared the historical performance of various spending strategies when the initial spending rate is 4%. Over the next couple weeks, we will apply an XYZ rule and consider how spending may be impacted by the low-interest-rate environment facing retirees.
Should Legacy Goals Be Part of Your Retirement Plan?

Figuring out how to plan for your legacy goals is a nice problem to have. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t worry about it. Whether or not legacy goals are part of your plan can seriously impact what your retirement will look like. Including them means you’ll have less to spend on yourself (and you’ll […]
5 Ways You’re Sabotaging Your Retirement

It seems that no matter how much information is out there, people are still hitting retirement with little or no preparedness at all. Here are 5 of the most common ways people are sabotaging their retirement.
Which Retirement Spending Strategy Is Right For You?

Deciding on the right retirement spending strategy for your particular situation is both incredibly difficult, and incredibly important. There are huge numbers of reasonable options, but how do you know which is right for you? The answer depends on several factors.
How Flexible Is Your Retirement Spending Plan?
A lot of expenses are negotiable, but many just aren’t. You have to buy groceries. You have to pay your homeowner’s insurance premiums. You have to go on that golf trip this winter (this one may be open to debate). As we’ve discussed in the past, it can be very useful to break expenses down […]
Retirement Spending And Required Minimum Distributions

One final spending rule serves as a reasonably easy way to implement an actuarial method for retirement spending. Actuarial methods generally have retirees recalculate their sustainable spending annually based on the remaining portfolio balance, remaining longevity, and expected portfolio returns.
Diversification Works In A Crisis (But It Doesn’t Work Miracles)

There are a lot of myths about diversification. Today, I want to address a pernicious lie floating around out there that diversification only works when times are good.
How to Use Life Insurance

Life insurance can be confusing. Especially since so many people want it to be. But it doesn’t need to be. Life insurance is one of the simplest financial tools out there – as long as you use it correctly. There are two basic components to your wealth: Your Financial Capital – All the stuff you […]