Category: Retirement Planning

Catch-up contributions have let workers 50 and older set aside extra retirement savings for years, but a newer provision carved out an even wider lane for a narrower slice of that group. Workers who land in a specific four-year age window now qualify for a bigger boost than everyone else covered by the standard rule,…

Retirement savers spend most of their careers bumping against the same annual contribution ceiling on a 401(k), a limit that resets only slightly from year to year. Once a worker crosses a specific age, though, the rules loosen in a way that can meaningfully accelerate savings in the final working years, and many eligible employees…

Starting with contributions made in the 2027 tax year, the federal government will begin depositing money directly into eligible low- and moderate-income workers’ retirement accounts rather than handing them a tax credit on their return. The rule creating this shift is already law; regulators are now working through the technical rules that will govern how…

A retiree who moves across a state line in search of lower costs often discovers that the move changed more than the price of groceries. Social Security and pension income are taxed by an entirely different set of rules once state government gets involved, and the difference between a state that leaves that income alone…

A retiree who has spent decades funding a 401(k) or a traditional IRA usually discovers, sooner or later, that the Internal Revenue Service will not let that money sit untouched indefinitely. One major category of retirement account works differently, and the difference can reshape how a household times withdrawals, manages taxable income, and plans what…

A retiree can spend hours with an attorney getting a will exactly right, naming who gets the house, the car, and the family keepsakes. None of that careful drafting reaches a 401(k) or an IRA. Those accounts are handed over according to a separate piece of paper, usually filled out once at account opening and…

When a private company’s pension plan runs out of money, the retirees who depend on it are not simply left with nothing. A federal insurance program exists specifically to keep the checks coming. But the guarantee behind that program is not unlimited, and workers who spent decades earning a large pension can find that the…

A revocable living trust or a payable-on-death account is often sold as a way to skip probate entirely, but that promise depends on one detail families frequently overlook: someone has to be named to step in when the original owner dies or can no longer act. A trust with no successor trustee, or an account…

Leaving a job often means facing a choice about what to do with money sitting in a 401(k), and cashing out looks like the simplest option: a single check, no paperwork about a new plan, and money in hand right away. That simplicity comes at a cost. Federal tax rules treat a cashed-out 401(k) as…

A surviving spouse who inherits an IRA has an option no other type of beneficiary is given: treating the account as if it had always belonged to the survivor. Rolling a late partner’s IRA into an account in the survivor’s own name resets the rules that govern early-withdrawal penalties and required distributions, often in the…