Category: Retirement Planning

When one spouse needs long-term nursing-home care and the couple turns to Medicaid to pay for it, a common fear is that the healthy partner will be left with nothing, the house sold, the savings gone. That fear is largely misplaced. Federal law includes a set of protections, built precisely to keep the spouse who…

Paying for a nursing home or years of in-home care can drain a lifetime of savings faster than almost anything else in retirement. Medicaid will eventually step in, but only after an applicant has spent down most of their assets to qualify. A specific kind of insurance, the state Long-Term Care Partnership policy, is built…

A Roth IRA has a reputation for being the account retirees can dip into without tax consequences, and for the money that was contributed, that reputation holds. The catch sits in the investment growth. Withdraw the earnings before the account has been open long enough, and the tax-free promise disappears, sometimes with a penalty attached…

Most people think of a health savings account as a strictly medical pot of money, useful only for doctor bills and prescriptions. That is largely true before retirement, when spending the funds on anything else triggers a steep penalty. But a rule that kicks in at age 65 quietly transforms the account into something far…

A short and often overlooked window in the tax code lets older workers pour extra money into a 401(k) right before retirement. For the 2026 tax year, employees who are between 60 and 63 by year’s end can make a larger “super” catch-up contribution than the standard over-50 amount. Used well, the higher limit gives…

Traditional pensions are disappearing, and companies that still carry them increasingly want them off the books. One common way to do that is a buyout offer: a letter arrives proposing to swap a worker’s promised lifetime monthly pension for a single lump-sum payment today. The figure can look enormous next to a modest monthly check,…

Inheriting an IRA used to come with decades to spread out withdrawals and the tax bill that comes with them. For most people who inherit one today, that flexibility is gone. Under the rule that took hold with the SECURE Act and was locked in by IRS final regulations, most beneficiaries who are not the…

Millions of lower- and moderate-income workers who put money into a 401(k) or IRA are eligible for a federal tax credit worth up to $1,000 that goes largely unclaimed, either because filers don’t know it exists or assume tax credits like this are reserved for people with children or larger incomes. The Saver’s Credit, formally…

A worker who leaves a job with money sitting in a 401(k) has choices to make, and one of the costliest mistakes is asking the plan to simply cut a check. The moment a retirement-plan balance is paid directly to the account holder instead of moving straight into another retirement account, the plan is required…

An IRA owner who has reached 70½ has a tool available that most people never use: sending money straight from the IRA to a charity, rather than taking the distribution personally and writing a separate check. Done correctly, that gift is excluded from taxable income entirely, even though the same withdrawal taken as cash would…