Most retirement planning literature portrays a retirement transition in the context of a couple or a family – but what about those who retire alone? What particular challenges do they face, and how must their preparation for retirement differ? Retiring alone presents unique challenges. Singles who retire may lack a spousal and familial support network other

With 2013 approaching, many families and their financial, tax and legal consultants are weighing major estate planning decisions. A short-term window of opportunity may be closing. The relatively low estate tax rates we have now may soon disappear, along with one of the largest federal tax breaks available in decades. Estate taxes are at 80-year lows. At the end of 2010, Congress reset the estate, gift and generation-skipping tax (GST) rates at 35% and raised[…]

How much salary should you defer into a retirement plan? Ultimately, the answer is “however much your budget allows you to contribute”. The big-picture question, however, is whether you need to contribute more to your retirement savings in order to maintain your lifestyle after your career is done. An Aon Hewitt analysis (The Real Deal: 2012 Retirement Income Adequacy

Recently, you may have heard about the “looming fiscal cliff”, the “coming fiscal cliff” and so forth. What exactly is it? Briefly stated, the “fiscal cliff” is a potential $7 trillion dilemma facing Congress this fall – a Congress not known for ready cooperation. If America goes over it, our economy could stumble.1 Will Congress act before 2013?

When should you (and your spouse) claim Social Security benefits? Could your cash flow be more important than your savings? What will you begin doing in retirement? Will your spouse want to live the way that you live? How will you save in retirement?

President Obama’s health care law has held up in the Supreme Court. So what impact might this have on the stock market, businesses, and investors in the coming months? How will Wall Street take this? After the June 28 ruling, stocks of key managed care companies fell while hospital stocks and Medicaid-related stocks rallied. Was this a reaction confined to a market day, or an indicator? Opinions differ.

The mandate stands. By a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court has upheld the core of the 2010 Affordable Care Act. The law’s most controversial provision will stand – the mandate requiring every American citizen to buy individual health insurance coverage.1 The court made a key distinction, interpreting that mandate not as a directive but as a tax.

The “reset button” has been removed. A few years back, the distinguished economist Laurence Kotlikoff alerted people to a loophole in the Social Security framework: retirees could dramatically increase their Social Security benefits by reapplying for them years after they first applied. It worked like this: upon paying back the equivalent of the Social Security benefits they had received to the federal government, retirees could fill out some simple paperwork to reapply for federal retirement[…]

Will the Bush-era tax cuts expire next year? We may not have an answer to that question for several months. After the November elections, you could see them extended once again. Nothing is certain: with the daunting financing challenges the federal government faces, they may finally expire in 2013. If your goal is tax minimization, here are 20 “to-dos” you might want to accomplish before 2013 arrives; alone or in combination, they could save you[…]

We have seen an epic “flight to safety” this spring. In April alone, $20.6 billion moved into bond funds, according to Lipper. In the same month, $12.7 billion left stock funds (which marked the 12th consecutive month of net withdrawals).1 The price of debt has really gone up, particularly U.S. and German sovereign debt. On June 1, the 10-year Treasury yield settled at 1.47% after touching an all-time low of 1.44%. It has consistently been[…]