You hit a lot of milestone birthdays when you’re young. There’s your first birthday, of course, and also the one where you turn 10 (finally, double digits!). At 13, you’re a teenager. At 16, you’re probably thinking about driving. At 18, you can vote; at 21, you can get into bars. You hit a bunch of milestones later in life as well, and many of them have to do with retirement. [...]

Rules of thumb are common in financial literature. Who can disagree with “buy low, sell high” or “decrease your risk exposure by diversifying your portfolio”? Author and retirement planner Dana Anspach, CFP®, RMA®, observes that these kinds of rules of thumb can be useful to point the way, but beyond that, may lose their value. In her Great Courses series on retirement, she notes that if you want to go from New York [...]

The U.S. Labor Department's Employee Benefits Security Administration has issued cybersecurity guidance for the first time. The information is directed at plan sponsors and fiduciaries regulated by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, and provides best practices for maintaining cybersecurity, including tips on how to protect the retirement benefits of America's workers. The guidance includes tips for hiring a service provider, cybersecurity best practices and online security tips.  

There are many things that can ruin a retirement plan. Bad returns are usually not one of them, but having a second home can be. Before you even consider purchasing a second home, make sure that you are on track for your retirement. If you already aren’t on track for retirement, then buying a second home will make the situation far worse. If you are on track, you still may not [...]

Few things feel better than to — finally — arrive at retirement confident about all the planning and saving you did to cause it to happen. It was decades in the making, but now it’s here. Unfortunately, you may not be out of the financial woods yet. A number of risks to your retirement strategy can still lurk even as you appear to have safely arrived at your post-work destination. [...]

It’s one of those debates that rarely seems to have a clear-cut winner: Should retirees pay off their mortgage or continue making those monthly payments? The answer — probably somewhat annoyingly — is that it depends. Of course, there are a couple of immediate benefits to paying off a mortgage: Your monthly obligations drop and you may get more wiggle room in your cash flow. However, depending on where the [...]