Advancing Toward Your Career Goals Should you change jobs in pursuit of them? Or position yourself in a new way at work? Is your career unfolding as it should? If not, maybe it is time for a change; either a change of jobs, or a change in your role at your workplace. Pay attention to the signals of a stalled career. If the status quo at your office bothers you, or if you feel apathetic or nonchalant about your work, [...]
Why Are We Saving More and Spending Less? Have our memories of the Great Recession altered our habits? Consumer spending accounts for more than two-thirds of economic activity in the United States. Lately, that spending has moderated. Across the 12 month sending in March, personal spending advanced 3.4%. That matched the gain seen in 2015.1,2 Is a 3.4% annualized gain in personal spending adequate? Not in historical terms. During 2014, consumer spending accelerated 4.2%. The average monthly gain in consumer [...]
How Millennials Can Get a Good Start on Retirement Planning Some simple steps may make a major financial difference over time. If you are younger than 35, saving for retirement may not feel like a priority. After all, retirement may be 30 years away; if your employer does not sponsor a retirement plan, there may be less incentive for you to start. Even so, you must save and invest for retirement as soon as you can. Time is your greatest [...]
Tell Your Beneficiaries About Your Accounts and Policies Let them know how they will receive retirement assets and insurance benefits. Will your heirs receive a fair share of your wealth? Will your invested assets go where you want them to when you die? If you have a proper will or estate plan in place, you will likely answer “yes” to both of those questions. The beneficiary forms you filled out years ago for your IRA, your workplace retirement plan, and [...]
Should You Plan to Retire on 80% of Your Income? Examining a long-held retirement planning assumption. A classic retirement planning rule states that you should retire on 80% of the income you earned in your last year of work. Is this old axiom still true, or does it need reconsidering? Some new research suggests that retirees may not need that much annual income to keep up their standard of living. The 80% rule is really just a guideline. It [...]