Category: Retirement & Social Security

Long-term care, the ongoing help with daily activities that many people need late in life, is expensive and largely uncovered by Medicare. Private long-term-care insurance is one way to prepare for that cost, but the price of a policy, and even the ability to buy one at all, depends heavily on the applicant’s age and…

A will is the document most people assume controls where their money goes after death, yet the largest accounts many older Americans own do not follow it. Individual retirement accounts, 401(k) plans, and similar workplace savings pass instead to whoever is named on a beneficiary form kept by the plan or custodian. When that form…

Settling an estate can tie up a bank account for months while a court oversees who gets what, even when the family already knows the answer. There is a simple tool that sidesteps that delay for money held in a bank. By adding a payable-on-death instruction to an account, an owner can direct the balance…

Workers fortunate enough to retire with a traditional pension usually face one consequential decision at the moment they start collecting: whether to take the largest possible monthly check or a smaller one that keeps paying a surviving spouse after the retiree dies. The choice is permanent, it is easy to get wrong in the rush…

Most retirees hold their savings in more than one kind of account, and the order in which those accounts are drawn down turns out to matter almost as much as how much was saved in the first place. A common approach among financial planners is to spend taxable brokerage money first, tap tax-deferred retirement accounts…

A health savings account is often described as a checking account set aside for medical bills, but that description sells it short. For older Americans who qualify to fund one, it doubles as one of the most tax-friendly retirement accounts in the entire code, stacking three separate tax advantages on top of one another. And…

Many older workers reach retirement with a substantial block of their former employer’s stock sitting inside a 401(k), built up over the years through payroll purchases and company matches. The automatic move, and the one most plan administrators nudge people toward, is to roll the entire account into an individual retirement account and be done…

For decades, retirement savers had to start pulling money out of their tax-deferred accounts not long after they stopped working. A pair of recent laws pushed that starting line back, and it is still moving. The age at which the government requires those withdrawals now depends on the year a person was born, and for…

Millions of workers change jobs and leave a 401(k) behind at a former employer, often without a second thought. The balance is still theirs, but it keeps paying fees the entire time it sits there, and those charges rarely announce themselves. Over years, administrative costs and pricey investment options can shave a meaningful slice off…

Two retirement accounts can hold nearly identical investments and still be governed by opposite rules once their owner reaches their seventies. A traditional IRA or 401(k) eventually forces money out on the government’s schedule, whether the owner needs it or not, and a missed withdrawal carries one of the steeper penalties in the tax code….