A reader named Bill recently asked for clarification on the details surrounding Roth IRA early withdrawal penalties. I’ve talked about this in the past, but with the end of the year looming, I thought it would be good to touch on it again.
As with traditional IRAs, the IRS views all of your Roth IRAs (assuming [...]

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Walter Updegrave of CNN/Money recently fielded a question from a guy whose employer employer had stopped matching his 401(k) contributions. He was wondering if he should start looking for a new job.
This is a perfectly reasonable question, as a loss of this sort of benefit is effectively a pay cut. But it also relates to [...]

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Ever thought about which states are the best (or worst) for retirement? Well, FCN contributor Richard Barrington (who is also the head honcho over at Money-Rates.com) recently crunched the numbers and came up with an answer.
In doing this, he looked at the following factors:

Cost of living
Property taxes
Unemployment rate
Violent crime rates
Property tax rates
Climate
Life expectancy for seniors
Recent [...]

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If you’re old enough, you may remember when Americans were, by and large, pretty responsible about money management.
They scrimped and saved, and stashed money into savings accounts. They squirreled away cash for vacations and home improvements, rather than funding those purchases with credit cards. And their belief was you kept on paying the mortgage on [...]

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According to the Social Security Administration, Social Security benefits will rise by just 1.7% in 2013. This is less than half of the 3.6% cost of living adjustment in 2012, though infinitely higher than the 0% increase in 2010 and 2011.
For those of you that are still working, this means that the Social Security [...]

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One of my favorite conversational gambits with old friends and new is retirement. Questions like, “When do you hope to retire?” and “How will you fill your time after you stop working?” never fail to spur entertaining exchanges.
I’m not shy about revealing my own feelings on the matter. I’ve seen too many living embodiments of [...]

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Time for another retirement rule of thumb… According to Fidelity investments, you should have saved 8x your annual (final) salary by the time you reach age 67 if you want to replace 85% of your pre-retirement income in retirement.
To stay on track for this, you should have saved 1x your income by age 35, 3x [...]

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Okay, so the fact that I’m writing this proves that I’m not really retired. But I am semi-retired, and that’s even better.
I graduated from college during the early 1980s, during an unemployment environment that by some measures was even tougher than today’s. Like many young people, I wasn’t wild about working, but being on my [...]

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Over the past few months, I’ve seen several instances in which people are advised to save X times their income for retirement. I first noted this back in July when an Aon Hewitt survey suggested that you should have at least 11x your annual income set aside for retirement.
In his book “Your Money Ratios,” Charles [...]

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I’ve tackled this general topic in the past, but I recently ran across an article on Time Moneyland talking about about the financial impact of packing your lunch instead of eating out. Back when I first wrote about this, I mused that if I could save just $3.50/workday ($70/month) and invested it at an 8% [...]

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