retirement

Should you help your aging parents financially?

04.24.2013
should you help your aging parent financially?

This is a tough question that will affect more and more of us every day. Pensions are becoming rarer and most people retiring today have very little retirement savings. Luckily, social security is still paying out, but that might change in the future. People are also living longer these days and it’s easy to see that more and older retirees will need help financially. Some background Of course, you should help your parents out if they need it. For me, the question really is how much I should help my parents. I come from an Asian background and our culture [...]

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Who the heck has $3,000,000 in their IRA?

04.19.2013
Obama cap 3 million IRA Mitt Romney $100,000,000 IRA

Have you paid attention to President Barack Obama’s 2014 proposed budget? It includes a provision to put a 3 million dollar cap on your tax-preferred retirement accounts. This proposal would generate $9 billion in revenue for the Treasury over the next decade according to White House. Actually, the limit would be based on the amount needed to buy an annuity that will pay $205,000 per year. What’s my cap? First of all, it seems a little silly to base the limit on annuity. The payout varies according to your age, sex, inflation, and interest rate. If you are a 62 [...]

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Face Retirement Head On

04.08.2013
face retirement head on scary old age

Recently, the Employee Benefit Research Institute released their 2013 Retirement Confidence Survey and the results aren’t unexpected. About half of the people surveyed have no or little confidence that they will have enough money to retire comfortably. Personally, I think most workers are too caught up in the present and haven’t thought much about retirement. It’s such a long way off, so why worry about it? It’s hard enough to make ends meet every month. This is a mistake because time flies and we’ll all be old before we know it. Getting old isn’t a very pleasant process so that’s probably why most young [...]

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Can You Retire Comfortably On $31,722 per year?

03.25.2013
Can You Retire Comfortably On $31,722 per year?

Can You Retire Comfortably On $31,722 per year? Last week, I wrote an article about minimizing tax on Social Security income after retirement. Basically, if you receive $15,000 of Social Security benefit and withdraw $17,500 from your IRA, then you will pay very little income tax. Using the standard deduction and exemption, you will only pay $778. That’s a 2% effective tax rate and you’ll have $31,722/year of after-tax income to spend in retirement. Anyway, this article was syndicated on Yahoo! and it received a bunch of comments. A bunch of whiners There were the usual complaints about Social Security [...]

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