Retirement Planning Topics
How much of your Social Security Benefit is actually taxable in retirement?
As someone who knows a lot about financial planning in general, and how retirement income is taxed in particular, this past year I discovered there was one area of the tax law that I was not knowledgeable of all the details. That is, how much of your social security benefit will be taxed. I am […]
Revisiting Portfolio Risk Tolerance…..Again
With the recent market volatility during 2022, I thought I would add a quick update to my blog site. What caused me to do this was a recent conversation I had with a family member. Like all of us, the recent down-draft in the stock and bond markets has been very unsettling to this person. […]
Over-valued Stock Market, What Should an Investor Do?
Today’s investment markets are extremely difficult. Safe fixed-income assets pay near zero interest and the stock market is at an historically high valuation. So what is a conservative investor to do, especially someone who is retired or is nearing retirement?
Should I Own Bitcoin?
In the last few months I have been asked by many friends, “What do you think of Bitcoin?” The real question I think these people are asking is, “Should I own Bitcoin?” When I delve deeper, these friends are mostly concerned about all the mind-boggling US federal government spending that has occurred in 2020-2021. They […]
Revisiting the 4% Rule
In the last couple years, I have been pondering this question, whether the 4% rule was still valid in the new investment environment going forward in the 2020s. I first wrote about the 4% rule in one of my first posts on this site in 2011 (you can read that post here). If you do […]
Should you Delay Collecting your Social Security Benefits?
Recently, I have received a few emails on my recent post (read it here) that I advised, in considering whether to buy a commercial income annuity, one should first delay collecting their social security benefits until age 70. These emailers believe this is the wrong advice for collecting social security. One of their concerns is […]
The Deferral Trap
My wife follows Twitter and sent me the below attached piece from Bloomberg about 401(k)s. I did not believe the title at first, but the article does make some valid points about the changes in tax laws and the availability of low cost funds to the general public since 401(k)s were created in the late […]
Update to Our Longevity Insurance Plan
In the early spring of 2019, I wrote two blog posts on addressing the biggest risk every person faces in retirement, longevity risk, and how to fit an income annuity into your retirement income plan to help address this risk. You can read these two posts here and here. However, due to several major life […]
A Winter in Southern Europe
It has been awhile since I last posted on this blog, so a quick update here on what we have been doing the past few months. In my last post I discussed how Hurricane Dorian that passed through the Abaco region of the Bahamas on 1-2 September 2019 and destroyed everything in its path. Our […]
Affording An Early Retirement
After the recent publishing of my ebook, Charting An Early Retirement, I have received a few inquiries from readers spanning several aspects of our retired life. The questions all had a similar theme; the readers want to know some of the nuts and bolts of how we actually afford our retirement. I thought in this […]
