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
Comments 52
Category: Downsizing
June 18, 2014 -- Downsizing and raising children have at least one thing in common- it's a lot easier to tell other people how to do it than it is to do it yourself! Topretirements has published several articles about downsizing (see Further Reading at end of article) due to member interest. In this article we will explore some new tips from all over, and hope that you will contribute your own suggestions in the Comments section below.
1. It is never too early to start.
We can't tell you many of our friends didn't leave enough time for
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Published on June 17, 2014
Comments 59
Category: Health and Wellness Issues
June 17, 2014 -- The Wexner Medical Center at The Ohio State University is making available a free diagnostic test, SAGE, to help assess cognitive, thinking, and memory impairments. It is a simple exam you can give yourself in just a few minutes.
Although it might be scary to realize that perhaps you might be prone to
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Published on June 17, 2014
Comments 0
Category: Retirement Planning
June 16, 2014 -- Your past responses to our various retirement surveys have been so interesting we just had to do it again. Today's survey focuses on the "Where" about retirement - where you are thinking about retiring to, what kind of community, and why. Since we created this survey over 1900 community minded folks have taken, here is a link to our complete report on the results, along with many of the more interesting/representative comments.
In the coming weeks Part 2 of this series will focus more on the financial and related issues having to do with retirement. Stay tuned
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Published on June 16, 2014
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