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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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