Retirement Planning Is a Family Affair

Retirement Planning Is a Family Affair

It’s pretty common among married couples for one spouse to take the lead as the family money manager. It’s usually the one with the most interest and/or time to spend dealing with taxes, investments, and household budgeting. Over the last several years I’ve been encountering more and more families where each spouse manages his and…
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IRA Rollover Loophole Soon To Be Plugged

The IRS wants to make it easy for you to set up and maintain IRA accounts.  Part of that strategy involves keeping your IRA accounts at whichever qualified custodian you prefer.  Should you become unhappy with the costs or services provided by one custodian, the IRS allows you to move some or all of the…
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How Market Timing Affects Portfolios

This is a follow-up to my post last October entitled “Should You Increase Equity Allocation in Retirement?”  (https://www.cognizantwealth.com/2013/10/24/should-you-increase-equity-allocation-in-retirement/).  At that time I cited research by Pfau & Kitces suggesting that retirees begin their retirement with their investment portfolio allocated very conservatively, and then gradually increase the allocation to stocks as they age.  In this post…
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Reverse Mortgages: The Good and the Bad

According to Consumer Reports some 70% of retirees’ net wealth is locked up in their homes. Given that, you’d think that reverse mortgages would be a very popular solution for tapping into all that wealth. Yet prior to 2012, the cost, complexity, and even stigma of utilizing a reverse mortgage have made it the choice…
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Not All Annuities Are Bad!

Annuities have been getting some bad press in the financial planning community. Financial planners tend to denigrate them due to their cost – “They have way too many fees, many of them hidden” – or due to the fact that they are not hedged against inflation, effectively reducing their usefulness at exactly the time (later…
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Roth Conversions Take Off

Richard Rubin and Margaret Collins at Bloomberg News recently reported that conversions from traditional IRAs to Roth IRAs increased more than nine times in 2010, according to the Internal Revenue Service.  Taxpayers converted $64.8 billion in 2010, as compared to $6.8 billion in 2009. This was the first year that Roth conversions were greater than…
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