The Internal Revenue Service (I.R.S.) is not usually thought of as an institution that adds a lot of value to our lives — to the contrary in fact. However, a few years ago, the researchers at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College came up with a simple and relatively safe retirement withdrawals strategy…

What Is a Self-Directed IRA? A Self Directed IRA is a type Individual Retirement Account (IRA)  that allows you to invest in a really wide variety of alternative investments.  Traditional IRAs require that  you invest in traditional asset classes — mainly stocks, bonds, funds, treasuries, annuities and certificates of deposit. Self Directed IRAs and Self…

Qualified Charitable Distributions (QCDs) are not only a way to help great causes and those in need, but they are also a way to manage your tax exposure and avoid unpleasant surprises.  For people who are at least 70 ½, and who don’t need income (or who simply want to avoid the income tax) from…

According to reporting from the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies, retirees have a wide variety of savings and investments.  Here are the average cash, savings, and home equity balances in the U.S.  Keep reading to see how your accounts and investment types compares to that of most retirees.  Use the NewRetirement Planner to see your…

We have a lot of choices about where to invest our money, both before and after retirement.  Some options are clearly bad investments. Others seem like a good bet, but they probably aren’t. While we would all like to find a shortcut to massive wealth, a more steady approach is probably the best route to…

Saving for retirement is hard.  However, when you are still working, creating a retirement investment plan can be relatively straightforward.  The goal is to simply grow the money. But, when you retire, your investment goals become multi-faceted, layered, and downright complicated. You still want your money to grow, but you have a whole lot of…

Diversification should be one of your retirement mantras. After all, if you have all your eggs in one basket, they’re more likely to all break if something goes wrong.  That is why you want to try to achieve the right asset allocation mix for your particular situation.  Continue reading for some rules of thumb as…

Were you the kid in kindergarten that secretly ate paste in the corner? Or were you the one solving all the math equations from the end of the book on your first day in class? (I knew those kids. Both of them were in my class, and I’m not yet admitting to being one of…

Ravee Mehta made a splash in 2012 when he published The Emotionally Intelligent Investor. The premise went against everything you learned about investing in the 20th century, like reason is better than emotion and that a few basic principles should guide all investors. While you never want to make an emotional decision with regards to…

You’ve spent your entire working career saving and investing for retirement. Now it’s time to develop a retirement withdrawals strategy. When you are thinking about withdrawing money from your retirement accounts, it’s important to come up with a strategy that ensures that your savings are going to last for a lifetime, are used efficiently, and…

Pensions have pretty much gone away.  We spend 20 to 30 years in retirement.  And Social Security covers only a fraction of our retirement expenses. This means we are pretty much responsible for saving everything we need for retirement on our own. This may seem like a daunting challenge; some people might consider the help…

Investing in ourselves doesn’t need to involve money. In fact, many of the best retirement investments do not involve greenbacks at all. Instead, they are investments that make the fullest use of our time, allow us to spend precious moments with the people we love, and enable us to focus on those things that make…