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Are you ready to hit the ground running on January 1, 2012? Before the holidays are in full swing and year-end commitments become overwhelming, it’s is a good time to look back at 2011 and establish resolutions for 2012.
There are a few goal-setting suggestions that could help you adhere to your 2012 financial New Year’s resolutions:
As I recently scraped the frost off my car windows, I couldn’t help but think about all those “snow birds” headed south for the winter. The migratory lifestyle is ideal for many retirees, but there’s also a growing contingent of Boomers making the expat leap and retiring abroad.
The allure of great weather and, in some cases, a cheaper cost of living is tempting. While numbers are difficult to nail down, there are probably more than 500,000 retirees living abroad, according to CBS Money Watch.
A move overseas takes some serious research and planning. If you’re thinking about joining the expat crowd, be sure you’ve addressed these considerations:
This is an exciting week in our office, and no, it’s not because the World Series has started, (well, maybe a little because of the World Series) it’s because we are in the midst of National Save for Retirement Week.
Retirement confidence reports continue to paint a picture of American workers unsure of their retirement future. According to a Sun Life Financial survey, one in five workers indicate they will not retire, and only 23% felt ‘very confident’ that they would be able to “meet basic living expenses in retirement.” It is startling to hear these numbers and know that only about 42% of workers, according to an Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) study, have tried to figure out how much to save to reach a comfortable retirement.
These survey results are a signal that change is in order for the American worker to start taking control of their own future.
With all the talk in Washington about budget issues and debt reduction plans, changes to 401(k) plans and retirement savings are occasionally thrown into the mix as political talking points. Recently, an article detailing the Senate Finance Committee’s upcoming hearing on proposed changes to retirement programs caught the attention of one of our blog followers, and they asked us to weigh in with our opinion.
We follow lots of really good blogs – mostly related to personal finance and economics. The Blog Round-Up allows us to point you in the direction of some great content from the blogging world. Posts* included in today’s round-up speak to the theme Ideas for Life During Retirement.
This unique post also falls into another series we run called Envisioning Retirement.
More studies and data are showing the benefits of envisioning your own retirement. People who can envision themselves in retirement are more likely to save more money and diligently plan for retirement.
To help you see and feel what your life could be like during retirement, this blog series will provide information and reviews about hobbies, travel and other activities you might enjoy during your retirement years.
Most articles about retirement planning focus on you – the future retiree. Oftentimes authors also discuss how spouses’ retirement savings will interact in a retirement strategy. Have you ever thought about how your retirement savings decisions will affect everyone else in your life?
Think about all your family, and even your friends. Your financial situation during retirement could be part of their lives too. (more…)
What can shopping for pants teach us about retirement investing? While this may sound like a silly question, it can teach us more than you might think. Allow me to explain.
An article in the May 23, 2011, edition of MarketWatch digs into the root causes of the problems retirees are facing.
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — The idyllic, play-golf-and-travel vision of retirement may well be a thing of the past. Most new retirees are either nervous or downright frightened about their golden years, according to a new study.
Uncertainty about the future, fear of poverty, lack of confidence in their investing abilities, and distrust of the financial-services industry were four of the most common feelings expressed by 300 recent or soon-to-be retirees in interviews conducted between 2008 and 2011 … (more…)
There was some hubbub recently in the world of retirement planning when Fidelity released some statistics from its 401(k) provider practice. Have you ever wondered how your employer retirement plan account balance compares with other people’s? Read on to see some of the Fidelity statistics, and read further to see why they don’t really matter. (more…)
Recently I heard a smartplanet interview with the Northwestern University professor who is leading research on the idea that people might make better retirement planning decisions when looking at their own aged picture:
We used a combination of software that relies on an age-progression algorithm. [This] allows people to take a photo of somebody and run it through this program. The age-progression algorithm does all the things that happen with aging — sagging the cheeks, the jowls, the eyes, graying the hair, adding some wrinkles. We conducted the study in a virtual reality environment, which allowed people to step into the body and the mind of someone we want to represent. We can have people go into this virtual world and look into a virtual mirror and interact with who they’ll be in the future.
Half of our participants did that — they saw themselves in the future. Half of our participants just saw a digital avatar of themselves now. We found that the participants who were exposed to their future selves allocated almost twice as much money to a hypothetical retirement account compared to the participants who were exposed to their current selves. (more…)
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