The financial news that actually matters
Covers retirement planning, Social Security benefits, pension systems, and long-term financial security. It helps readers understand how to prepare financially for retirement.
One of the most expensive assumptions in retirement is that Medicare will pay for a nursing home. Many older Americans carry that belief for years, only to discover the truth at the worst possible moment, when a parent or spouse needs round-the-clock help and the bills start arriving. Original Medicare was never built to cover…
Two of the most common sources of guaranteed retirement income can look almost identical on a monthly statement. A Social Security payment and an annuity check both arrive on schedule, both promise to keep coming for life, and both feel like a bedrock a household can count on. Yet one of them is quietly designed…
In households where one partner earned most or all of the income, the other often assumes retirement will leave them with little Social Security of their own. That assumption sells the program short. Social Security’s spousal benefit is built for exactly this situation, paying a husband or wife up to half of the higher earner’s…
The age at which a retiree can collect a full, unreduced Social Security benefit has finished a slow climb that lawmakers set in motion decades ago. For everyone born in 1960 or later, that age is now 67 — not the 65 that still lives in many people’s minds, and not the 66 that applied…
When a Social Security recipient dies, surviving family members often assume the program will help cover the immediate expenses that follow. What Social Security actually offers as a one-time death benefit is a single payment of $255 — an amount that has not changed in roughly seventy years. For a generation that has watched the…
A large share of Americans claim Social Security the moment they become eligible at 62, and many of them are still working when they do. What often comes as a surprise is that a long-standing rule can hold back part of that early check for anyone under full retirement age who earns more than a…
For many older Americans, a marriage that ended years, or even decades, ago still holds a piece of financial value that quietly goes unclaimed. Social Security allows a divorced person to draw a monthly benefit built on a former spouse’s earnings record, and choosing to do so takes nothing away from that former spouse. The…
For most of Medicare’s history, there was no ceiling on what a beneficiary could be forced to spend out of pocket on prescription drugs. A retiree with cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, or another condition treated with an expensive specialty medication could watch drug bills climb into the thousands of dollars a year, with no…
Every autumn brings two announcements that shape a retiree’s budget for the year ahead: how much Social Security checks will rise, and how much Medicare will cost. They are usually reported as separate news items, one about a raise and one about a bill. For most older Americans, though, the two are wired directly together….
When the Social Security Administration pays a beneficiary more than the rules allow, it treats the surplus as a debt to be collected, even when the error was the agency’s own. For years the government recovered those overpayments gently, shaving a small slice off each monthly check. That approach has since hardened, and the current…