From a retirement planning perspective, the decade between your 40^th and 50^th birthday is a time when, if you haven’t started saving for retirement, you definitely should.  Of course anyone who started putting money away before then is going to be better positioned financially than you are to meet their long-term retirement goals, but the good news is that there’s still plenty of time to shore up your savings even if you’ve been hitting the “snooze button” on your retirement plans for the last 20-odd years.

Gregory Olsen, a certified financial planner with Lenox advisors, says that “for a lot of people, they celebrate their 40^th birthday in earnest”.… Read the rest

One sad fact that all people nearing or already in retirement have to deal with today is that income during retirement is lower than it’s ever been in  the last 60 years.  What does this mean for people who are nearing retirement? It means that saving as much as possible (in all areas of their financial picture) is vital as well as having a plan to achieve realistic rates of return on all of their investments once they retire.

A reasonable rate of return is between 3 and 6% and, depending on whether you’d like to use everything that you have during retirement or pass some of that money on to your heirs, the steps below will help you to plan accordingly.… Read the rest

Hello and welcome back for Part 2 of our 2 part blog series on the best tips for increasing your Social Security payments. In Part 1 we went over quite a few different tips that you can use to make sure that your Social Security check will be as high as possible and that you get the most benefit out of all those years you put in the workforce. Part 2 is more of the same and should help you to maximize your checks and minimize any chance that Uncle Sam takes too much. Enjoy.

Just like practically any income that you’ll make as an American today, your Social Security checks are taxable if you make too much income during your retirement years.… Read the rest

Okay, let’s all take a minute and honestly look at where Social Security is going. Chances are that, if you are in your 30s or 40s, it might not even be around by the time you retire. Don’t get us wrong, we certainly hope that it is, but the fact is that it’s getting decimated every year and our lovely federal government is doing to decimating. Hopefully this will change but, frankly, not going to hold our collective breath.

Now that we’ve got that little bit of negativity out of the way we like to share with you some of the best ways that we know of to increase your retirement payments from Social Security as best as you can.… Read the rest