Category: Retirement Planning

A health savings account is often sold as triple tax-advantaged: pretax contributions, tax-free growth, and tax-free withdrawals for medical costs. Less understood is a fourth advantage built into the timing. The money used to reimburse a medical bill does not have to come out the same year the bill was paid, or even the same…

Nursing home care routinely costs several thousand dollars a month, enough to wipe out a couple’s combined savings within a year or two if both spouses’ assets and income counted against Medicaid eligibility the same way they would for a single applicant. Congress addressed that risk in 1988 with a set of protections, known as…

Losing a spouse rearranges a household’s finances in ways that go well beyond grief and paperwork. One of the least understood changes is a shift in tax filing status that often lands the very next year, and it can push the same retirement income into a noticeably higher bracket. The change has nothing to do…

A worker who leaves a job at 55 or older sometimes assumes that touching retirement savings before age 59½ automatically triggers a 10 percent tax penalty on top of ordinary income tax. A narrower rule inside the tax code says otherwise for one specific situation: separating from an employer in or after the year a…

A house that passes to an heir carries a tax advantage that a house sold by its original owner usually doesn’t: the property’s cost basis, for capital-gains purposes, generally resets to its fair market value on the date the owner died. That reset, known as the step-up in basis, is why an heir who sells…

Workers who switch jobs several times over a career often leave behind a 401(k) or pension benefit at a former employer, sometimes without ever rolling it over or collecting it. Tracking down that money later has traditionally meant hunting down a company that may have merged, changed names, or gone out of business entirely, with…

Retirees who forget, miscalculate, or simply run out of time to take a required withdrawal from a traditional IRA or 401(k) now face a smaller tax bill than the rule used to impose. The Internal Revenue Service still treats a missed or short required minimum distribution as a real compliance failure, but the excise tax…

A homeowner who wants a house to reach an heir without a lawyer, a court filing, or a probate case can often skip all three with a transfer-on-death deed. The document lets an owner name a beneficiary who inherits the property automatically at death, while the owner keeps full ownership and control of the house…

Long-term-care insurance was sold for decades on the promise of a stable premium locked in at the age of purchase. For hundreds of thousands of policyholders, that promise has not held. State insurance regulators, coordinated through the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, have approved wave after wave of rate increases on older policies, and the…

A beneficiary designation form is one of the shortest documents in retirement planning, and one of the most consequential. Leaving the beneficiary field blank, or defaulting to the account owner’s estate because the form was never updated, can turn an inherited IRA that might otherwise stretch across a decade of measured withdrawals into one that…