This post is from staff writer Jeffrey Steele.
The following has occurred to me countless times; maybe it has you as well. Perhaps you’ve even been the one to utter those oft-repeated words.
Two or more people are talking about how far behind they are in saving for retirement. They’ve saved so little, in fact, that the idea [...]

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This post is from staff writer Jeffrey Steele.
The Employee Benefit Research Institute’s 2013 Retirement Confidence Survey was released in mid-March, and reinforced the notion that within many sober reports on serious personal finance subjects, we can find a few good laughs.
In short, one will come away from perusing this survey with more than just a [...]

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Long-time readers will know that I’m a big fan of funding our Roth IRAs through the proverbial backdoor. What I mean by this is circumventing the Roth IRA contribution limits by contributing to a traditional IRA and converting it to a Roth shortly thereafter.
For 2013, the ability to contribute to a Roth IRA phases out [...]

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The woman to my right at the table was beautiful; striking smooth grey hair, an elegant style of dress that I admired and would happily have copied. At one point when I asked her to introduce herself — I was leading a workshop on promoting books through social media.
It was then that I learned that [...]

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In talking about drawing income from a retirement portfolio, I’ve often referred to the 4% rule. This rule holds that, if you withdraw an inflation-adjusted 4% from a balanced stock/bond portfolio, there would be a high likelihood of your money lasting 30 years.
However, the 4% rule dates back to academic research that was published [...]

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Over the holidays, I ran across a nice article by Philip Brewer over at Wisebread. In it, he talked about how much you’ll need for retirement in the context of safe withdrawal rates, using the 4% rule as an example.
In other words, if you assume that you can safely withdraw 4%/year from your retirement portfolio, [...]

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As we ring in the New Year, people are often inspired to clean up their finances. One popular move is to roll your old 401(k) plan into an IRA. In many cases this is a good decision — but not always.
In a recent article on MarketWatch, Mike Piper of Oblivious Investor fame shared with us [...]

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Does your employer offer a retirement plan such as a 401(k), 403(b), or 457(b)? If so, then you might be interested in knowing that the contribution limits for these account types has increased for 2013.
This means that individuals under age 50 can contribute up to $17,500 to their 401(k) account this coming year, up from [...]

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With just a week to go before the New Year, I thought I’d put together a quick post on IRA contribution limits for 2013. As a reminder, contribution limits have been indexed to inflation since 2008, and can increase in $500 increments (as necessary).
As you can see from the table below, nothing had changed in [...]

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Speaking of becoming a millionaire (or not), the most recent issue of Money magazine had some interesting statistics on how much money people think they’d need to retire today.
Based on the results of a national poll:

10% of respondents said $250k-$500k
24% of respondents said $500k-$1M
35% of respondents said $1M-$2M
31% of respondent said over $2M

At the same [...]

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