Category: Retirement
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10 Retirement Pitfalls: Putting College Ahead of Retirement
If you had to decide between saving for your children’s college fund or saving for your retirement, you might be tempted to pick college fund first. I think the main reason for that is because retirement is always such a nebulous concept anyway whereas school is very concrete, so people opt to fund something they…
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Retirement Round Up – Benchmarks Reviewed, Order Explained & More
Five Cent Nickel has a post about prioritizing retirement accounts, a topic well understood by a lot of personal finance bloggers but not often talked about. Essentially the order is 401k until match, then Roth, then 401k until max, and then… well, read FCN’s article because he has more options than normal and it’s interesting…
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Are You Saving Enough For Retirement?
Kiplinger’s has a great little retirement calculator that will calculate whether or not you’re prepared for retirement give you and your spouse’s (if you have one) current financial situation. While no calculator is perfect and no calculator can predict the future, it’s very important for everyone to at least have the confidence that they’re headed…
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Helping Your Children Save for Retirement
If you have kids that have earned some income this year and quickly spent it on an XBox 360 or the new Nintendo Wii, you have an opportunity to help them along in their retirement by giving them a gift and having them put that amount towards their Roth IRA. You’re allowed to give anyone…
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10 Retirement Resolutions: Pay Down Your Mortgage
US News and World Report had a little piece where they discussed some good New Year’s resolutions related to retirement and I thought that I’d put each of them through their paces. The fifth retirement resolution was to pay down that home mortgage. Pay down your mortgage. “Try to figure out ways to reduce your…
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10 Rules: Defer Taxes
This final tip in Forbes’ ten rules for building wealth starts dabbling in tax implications and how income and capital gains taxes will affect you investment decisions. The two tips they gives: Be aware of whether your sale will be a short term or long term capital gain. A short term capital gain will be…
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10 Rules: Reduce Credit Card Debt
This tip in Forbes’ ten rules for building wealth starts moving away from retirement planning in the strictest sense and starts dabbling in good personal finance advice: reduce and avoid credit card debt (and all other debt too, but start with credit cards). Forbes recommends ranking them by interest rate and paying off the highest…
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10 Rules: Save It Automatically
The only way to guarantee that something happens regularly is if you make it automatic (duh!) and that’s the focus of this sixth tip of Forbes ten rules for building wealth: make saving automatic. This is the premise of David Bach’s The Automatic Millionaire and it’s definitely a tip that, twenty years from now, you…
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10 Rules: Starting Early
The first rule in the series of ten towards building wealth is probably the most important tip of the ten and it’s the one that every young professional should take to heart, even if they don’t really want to worry about retirement in forty years: start early. Not much else to it! The tip compares…