The Snowball Effect Save and invest, year after year, to put the full power of compounding on your side. Have you been saving for retirement for a decade or more? In the foreseeable future, something terrific is likely to happen with your IRA or your workplace retirement plan account. At some point, its yearly earnings should begin to exceed your yearly contributions. Just when could this happen? The timing depends on several factors, and the biggest factor may simply [...]
Guarding Against Identity Theft Take steps so criminals wont take vital information from you. America is enduring a data breach epidemic. The latest annual study of the problem from Javelin Strategy & Research, a leading financial analytics research firm, says that 16.7 million people across the nation were impacted by I.D. theft in 2017 an all-time high.1 The problem is getting worse much worse. Last year, 30% of U.S. consumers were alerted about data breaches by firms [...]
How Retirement Spending Changes With Time Once away from work, your cost of living may rise before it falls. New retirees sometimes worry that they are spending too much, too soon. Should they scale back? Are they at risk of outliving their money? This concern is legitimate. Many households “live it up” and spend more than they anticipate as retirement starts to unfold. In ten or twenty years, though, they may not spend nearly as much.1 The initial stage of [...]
Why Having a Financial Professional Matters A good professional provides important guidance and insight through the years. What kind of role can a financial professional play for an investor? The answer: a very important one. While the value of such a relationship is hard to quantify, the intangible benefits may be significant and long lasting. A good financial professional can help an investor interpret today’s financial climate, determine objectives, and assess progress toward those goals. Alone, an investor may be [...]
Annuities for Retirement Income Why seniors choose them, and what prospective annuity holders should consider. Imagine an income stream you cannot outlive. That sums up the appeal of an annuity. If you are interested in steady retirement income (and the potential to defer taxes), you might want to look at the potential offered by annuities. Before making the leap, however, you must understand how they work. Just what is an annuity? It is an income contract you arrange with [...]
