Ideas, Opinions, Genealogy, and Book Reviews
A good book on making sure you don’t outlive your money and estate planning. I liked this book but had a few minor quibbles with it which I will mention at the end since I don’t think they influence the quality of advice at all. The full title is More Life Than Money: How Not to Outlive Your Savings .
Since this is a bit of a mix review, I’ll start with what I liked.
Continue reading “More Life Than Money”
I had my reservations about this book after reading the first few pages. It seemed like a promotional advertisement for a specific firm. The full title is A Life Care Plan: Helping You Navigate The Aging Journey by Barbara McGinnis; Bryan J Adler; Tim Takacs; Jerold Rothkoff; Debra King; Kathleen Magee; Jacinda Graham
Continue reading “A Life Care Plan: Helping You Navigate The Aging Journey”
The full title is Don’t Run Out of Money in Retirement: How to Increase Income, Avoid Taxes, and Keep More of What Is Yours by Allen P. Harris.
After the first few pages, I thought I would not like this book. Those pages seemed more about how the author’s company was helping the community and I suspected this would be more of an advertisement than a substantive book on retirement. I was wrong.
Continue reading “Don’t Run Out of Money in Retirement by Allen P. Harris”
I found the The IRA and Retirement Plan Owner’s Guide to Beating the New Death Tax by accident. I am retired and have some money saved in IRAs. I knew there were some changes around the IRA law but didn’t know the whole story. So I was hoping to find a new book explaining those changes in detail.
The full title is The IRA and Retirement Plan Owner’s Guide to Beating the New Death Tax: 6 Proven Strategies to Protect Your Family from The SECURE Act by James Lange.
Republicans often talk about individual responsibility and state-level innovation and things like saving for the future or retirement. But they seem to be against state programs that will help with retirement saving. Why?
Is it because this is directed toward workers without an employer retirement plan who tend to be poorer? Is it because this innovation was supported by a Democratic administration? Is it because Wall Street cannot make its share of profit off this?
I don’t know the motivation to prevent these retirement saving plans but Republicans in the House seem very intent on repealing the regulations that make this possible.
These plans make perfect sense to me and I wrote about the Republican opposition to them several weeks back (see Repeal but not replaced ). But I am not an economist so I was interested to read an article on this by a professor of economics.
This is not an academic or technical article on retirement saving.
So here is how it starts –
Thirty-nine million Americans work for an employer without a payroll-deduction retirement savings plan, and many of them are saving little or nothing. In the absence of a federal plan for this problem, states including California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland and Oregon have taken it upon themselves to create their own solutions.
This flurry of state-level innovation might be cause for celebration, except for one major impediment: Congress may kill the nascent plans. Why? Republicans, who typically call for less regulation, say the state programs won’t be sufficiently regulated. You can’t make this stuff up.
See, not very dry at all. It is well worth reading the whole thing, so here is a link –
Rescuing Retirement is an interesting and important book. Millions of older Americans are living in poverty or close to it. Our retirement system is broken. And we should and can fix it. This book is about how we do that.
The full title is Rescuing Retirement: A Plan to Guarantee Retirement Security for All Americans by Tony James and Teresa Ghilarducci.
Continue reading “Rescuing Retirement: Guarantee Retirement Security”
Several months ago I reviewed a book Get What’s Yours that explained in detail how to maximize your Social Security Benefits. This is a good thing to know as we go into retirement. But the government went and changed the rules. Now you need a Social Security update.
At least one strategy laid out in the book, and perhaps a good one for many of us, will no longer be available as of a certain date. You may need to buy the book now if you plan on any Social Security action in the next few months. A revised edition to include the latest rules is in the works.
Check the getwhatsyours.org/ website to get the latest Social Security update from the authors of this book.
I’ve been doing this blog called the RetiredGuy and I picked that name because I am a retired guy, I like being retired and I wanted to express my opinions on a variety of issues. But despite calling the blog the RetiredGuy, I usually don’t address retirement issues issues in a big way.
But what started me thinking about was an email discussion of when to start taking Social Security among my high school classmates. Most of us are still working but a few (like me) decided to retire early.
So I looked into Social Security because a big question is Continue reading “When should I take Social Security?”
I just read Get What’s Yours: The Secrets to Maxing Out Your Social Security by Laurence J. Kotlikoff, Philip Moeller, and Paul Solman. It was an enjoyable experience.
Yes, I used the words “social security” and “enjoyable” in the same paragraph.
Imagine my surprise when I read this book that I thought would be important but dull and found it enjoyable. The authors not only convey the basic facts about social security and discuss how to maximize your benefits but do so in an entertaining fashion.
If you are unconvinced, Continue reading “Social Security – Get What’s Yours”
I have previously discussed the use of the CPI-E (Consumer Price Index for the Elderly): Seniors, cost of living and benefit cuts and Strengthening Social Security.
There is a bill in the HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES (H. R. 4202) to use the CPI-E in many Federal retirement programs, although I do not see a mention of Social Security. I’m wondering if it does make more sense to start with programs more closely tied to Federal employment (both civilian and military) and perhaps expand the idea to Social Security as the government fiscal situation improves.
Thank you Rep Rangel for sponsoring this bill; and thanks also to the 51 cosponsors. Also thanks to those sponsoring similar bills in both the House and Senate.
I had written last month about bills to Strengthen Social Security which were bottled-up in committee. And sad to say but that is still the case.
The Strengthening Social Security Act of 2013 was introduced in both houses of Congress (S. 567 sponsored by Senator Tom Harkin and H.R. 3118 sponsored by Representative Linda Sanchez). The Senate bill was introduced last March and has been in the Committee on Finance since then. The House bill was introduced in September and remains with the House Education and the Workforce Committee.
The Strengthening Social Security Act of 2013 bases Social Security COLAs based on the Consumer Price Index for the Elderly (CPI-E). This would be a better index as it is designed to account for the different spending patterns as we enter our senior years.
The bill also addresses some long-term problems to strengthen Social Security.
Much of the present talk around social security today involves cutting benefits. In my opinion this is not the way to go.
I think we need to talk about this. A good first step to my way of thinking would be to get these bills out of committee and allow debate on the floors of congress.
Perhaps a non-political panel would come up with additional ideas and be more willing to discuss long-term solutions. I would guess that most of these people have political opinions but I also think since they don’t have to worry about being re-elected, they might be more willing to consider ideas which don’t necessarily match-up with the ideas of their party.
I had previously written about cost of living adjustments (COLAs) in retirement. It is a hard subject since there are many ways to estimate this.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS; website bls.gov) has developed several tools to estimate this. They developed the Consumer Price Index (CPI) which approximates a cost of living index. But this is not simple to estimate. Continue reading “Strengthen Social Security”