Seventy may be the new sixty — but not where the Internal Revenue Service is concerned. People who turned 70-1/2 last year must begin taking required annual withdrawals from their tax-deferred retirement accounts no later than Friday. Yet it seems that some of these seniors didn’t get the memo. Fidelity Investments reports that nearly half [...] [...more]
Talk about an easy lay-up shot. Buried in President Obama’s 2013 budget is a proposed tax break that would make retirement easier to manage for half of America’s seniors – at very low cost to government coffers. The administration proposes exempting seniors from the rules requiring them to take distributions from tax-deferred retirement accounts starting [...] [...more]
Inherited retirement accounts are truly one of those gifts that keep on giving because heirs can benefit for many years without much tax burden. But Congress is starting to talk about curtailing breaks on the accounts. A revenue-raising proposal floated in the Senate Finance Committee last week would sharply limit the time allowed for the [...] [...more]
Set it and forget it,” infomercial marketer extraordinaire Ron Popeil used to say. That might have worked for Ron’s easy-to-use chicken rotisserie — but it’s not a good approach for your retirement portfolio. Even the best-built retirement plan needs a periodic check-up, so my column at Reuters Money this week offers seven tips, tweaks and [...] [...more]
Retirement investors have struggled with a Jekyll and Hyde economy these past two years, where Dr. Jekyll lives very well on Wall Street while Mr. Hyde runs roughshod over a terrified Main Street. On Main Street, the jobless rate tops 9 percent and 14 million residential mortgages are underwater – a figure Deutsche Bank thinks [...] [...more]
