Category: Retirement Planning

For years, the most common reason a worker cracked open a 401(k) under hardship rules was a medical bill. That is no longer the case. Preventing a foreclosure or eviction has become the top qualifying emergency cited by participants in Vanguard’s retirement plans, according to the firm’s 2025 How America Saves report, which tracks roughly…

As of May 27, 2026, Parent PLUS borrowers who have not yet consolidated their federal loans have roughly 34 days to file paperwork that will determine whether they can ever access income-driven repayment. After June 30, the door closes for good. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law on July 4, 2025, eliminates…

A 401(k) loan defaults the moment you leave your employer, turning the balance into a taxable distribution plus a 10% penalty unless you repay within 60 days. Picture handing in your two weeks’ notice, thrilled about a better offer, only to open a tax form the following January showing that the $15,000 you borrowed from…

A 73-year-old retiree with $500,000 sitting in a traditional IRA owes the IRS a required minimum distribution of roughly $18,868 this year. Skip that withdrawal entirely by December 31, and the penalty alone comes to about $4,717, calculated as 25% of the missed amount. That is on top of whatever ordinary income tax is eventually…

Somewhere in the United States, roughly 544,000 people logged into their Fidelity 401(k) accounts at the end of the first quarter of 2025 and saw a balance of $1 million or more. That is the highest count Fidelity has ever recorded. By mid-2026, that data point is more than a year old, but it remains…

For years, families who oversaved in a 529 plan faced an uncomfortable set of options: pay for something that didn’t qualify and absorb a 10% federal penalty plus income tax on earnings, change the beneficiary and hope another family member could use the funds, or simply let the balance sit. That changed when Congress passed…

Picture a 16-year-old lifeguard who earns $3,500 between Memorial Day and Labor Day. After buying a pair of sneakers and setting aside gas money, she still has enough to do something most adults wish they had done at her age: open a Roth IRA. If she puts $2,000 into that account and never adds another…

A 50-year-old teacher in Virginia has $180,000 sitting in her 403(b). She knows she should own long-term-care insurance. She has even been quoted a premium: $2,200 a year for a standalone policy. But between her mortgage, two kids in daycare, and a car payment, writing that check has never quite made the cut. As of…

When Alyssa Bridgeman left her warehouse logistics job in 2021, she didn’t think much about the $2,800 sitting in her 401(k). She started a new position, enrolled in a new plan, and moved on. Two years later, she learned her old balance had been pushed into a default IRA invested in a money-market fund earning…

Somewhere in the retirement system, there is probably an account with your name on it that you have completely forgotten about. Maybe it is from a job you left five years ago, or ten, or fifteen. Maybe the plan changed administrators and the statements stopped coming. Maybe the balance felt too small to deal with…