Steps to see that financial matters remain in good order. When a spouse passes away, the emotion and magnitude of the loss can send our lives reeling. This profound change can also affect our finances. All at once, we have a to-do list before us, and the responsibility of it can make us feel pressured. With that in mind, this article is intended as a kind of checklist – a list of some of the key financial matters to address following the death of a spouse. The first steps. These actions should come first. Some of these steps do require locating some documentation. Hopefully, your spouse kept these documents where you can easily find them – either at home, in a safe deposit box, or in an onli
Without such strategies, they can risk going through their savings too fast. Provided by «representativename» Every day, articles appear urging people to save for retirement. These articles are so prevalent that it may seem like retirement planning is entirely about getting people to save. Actually, retirement planning concerns much more than that. It has another aspect well worth discussing: the eventual spending of all of that money that has been accumulated. Too few Americans coordinate their retirement spending. Earlier this year, Ameriprise asked more than 1,300 savers aged 55-75 if they had a drawdown strategy in mind for the future. Nearly two-thirds of the pre-retirees surveyed did n
Emotion often drives our financial decisions, even when logic should. When we go to the grocery store, we seldom shop on logic alone. We may not even buy on price. We buy one type of yogurt over another because of brand loyalty, or because one brand has more appealing packaging than another. We buy five bananas because they are on sale for 29 cents this week – the bargain is right there; why not seize the opportunity? We pick up that gourmet ice cream that everyone gets – if everyone buys it, it must be a winner. As casual and arbitrary as these decisions may be, they are remarkably like the decisions many investors make in the financial markets. A degree of emotion also factors into many of
Most of the loopholes that let retirees do this are gone, but two possibilities remain. Years ago, retirees exploited loopholes in Social Security’s framework to dramatically increase their lifetime Social Security benefits. Many of the tactics they used are no longer permitted, but there are still a couple of ways to restart those retirement benefits in pursuit of higher monthly income. Once, retirees could hit “reset” on their benefits, years after first receiving them. They could repay the federal government an amount equal to the benefits they had already received, and then reapply for benefits at their current, older age. Basically, they were boosting their monthly incomes after repayin