401(k)
« Previous EntriesDo You Know What Your 401(k)’s Personal Rate of Return is for 2011?
Monday, October 3rd, 2011I just logged on to my wife’s 401(k) account. The balance is roughly $60,000 less than it was at the peak early this year (and this includes several thousand dollars of contributions). OUCH. Fidelity calculates a personal rate of return, which is the return adjusted for the timing of contributions. Our personal rate of return [...]
Getting a Raise? Up Your 401(k) Contribution a Percentage Point
Tuesday, April 26th, 2011Let’s say you make $75,000 per year and you are saving 10% in your 401(k). Now let’s say you get a 5% raise, which puts your new annual income at $78,750. Now, before you go make a budget based on your new income, I want you consider increasing your 401(k) contribution percentage by 1% to [...]
An Idea I Don’t Like: Variable Annuities Inside a 401(k)
Wednesday, March 9th, 2011Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal had a special retirement planning section. One of the articles was about using annuities during retirement to boost income and decrease volatility. One of the stable annuities for doing that is a fixed immediate annuity. I don’t have a problem with fixed immediate annuities because they are usually inexpensive, easy to [...]
Your Goal This Year: Save $8.25 Per Hour
Friday, January 14th, 2011$8.25 per hour… That’s the number I get when I divide $16,500 (the 2011 maximum allowable employee 401(K) contribution) by 2000 hours (40-hour work week, 50 weeks per year). It seems like a lot. Granted, it does not include the tax savings on contribution. The actual dollar amount would be lower after taxes. Still, the [...]
Question of the Day: 401(K) Contributions
Tuesday, January 11th, 2011As I was going over our finances at the end of 2010, I decided to increase our contributions to my wife’s 401(K) by two percentage points. We are now at 10%. We had done the maximum for a couple of years when she first started working but had to back off quite a bit after [...]
Annuities in a 401(k) – I Can’t Tell You How Much I Hate This Idea
Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010Cruising the ‘net this AM, I came across this article on Yahoo!: Annuities May Be Coming to 401(k)s. It wasn’t too long ago that I read that most 401(k) plans were too complex and offered too many choices for employees, which made the decision-making process too difficult. So now they want to add annuities to [...]
Question(s) of the Day – Retirement Planning
Monday, September 13th, 2010Here are today’s Questions of the Day: Do you feel like your retirement plan is on the right path to get you to your retirement goal? How often do you track your progress? Would you like to see more posts from AFM about retirement planning? This is an issue I’m going to be addressing this [...]
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