QUESTION: I’m living on just my retirement during this pandemic. How can I stretch my dollars? ANSWER: Making ends meet on what normally is a limited monthly income can be challenging for many retirees and that’s particularly true during a pandemic. COVID-19 mandated restrictions have reduced some routine expenditures, such as eating out in restaurants, going to entertainment venues and sporting events. Likewise, other costs likely have increased, such as [...]

It's scary to stop earning income when you stop working, but everyone dreams of a comfortable retirement, so it's a bridge you'll have to cross eventually. Popular sources of retirement income, such as Social Security and retirement accounts, might be enough to cover bills for most investors, but there are several alternative cash flow opportunities that are often overlooked or underused. These four surprising sources of retirement income are less common for [...]

A group of small investors who frequented an internet chat board produced mammoth gains in GameStop stock in recent days, while saddling big Wall Street players with elephantine losses. In the fallout, the popular stock-trading app Robinhood and several hedge funds are reeling, even as some of the GameStop investors have moved on to other targets — most recently, the market for silver. Is this something that should concern retirement savers? [...]

Retirement savings challenges are derailing many workers amidst the Covid-19 pandemic.   The resulting economic crisis is taking a toll.  The retirement savings challenges last year disrupted many employees’ ability to build their retirement balances.  Fortunately, a single year cannot spell disaster for retirement savings – so long as it does not become a pattern that persists for many years. According to a recent BenefitsPro article, 2020 challenged 401(k) metrics like no other plan [...]

If you gave any thought to retirement back when you were younger — in the ’80s, ’90s or early 2000s — you probably expected to follow the same path your parents and grandparents did. How to Address Retirees’ No. 1 Concern After years of working hard, you would have a nice company pension to rely on. You would claim Social Security sometime between 62 and 65. And though your house [...]

Public retirement system revenues depend more on earnings on investments to drive revenues, according to an annual study by the National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems. The 2020 NCPERS Public Retirement Systems Study, conducted with Cobalt Community Research, covered the most recently concluded fiscal year. Of the 138 state and local pension systems responding, 51% were state systems and the rest were local systems, with a collective 12.8 million [...]