Retirement Planning
« Previous Entries Next Entries »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 [...]
How Old Will You Be When You Retire?
Monday, April 4th, 2011Interesting video from Vanguard: Whenever I hear interviews like this with random people, it makes me realize how little people actually know about retirement planning. That young guy that says a million dollars would be nice, has no clue. Sure, one million dollars sounds nice but it will be nothing by the time he reaches [...]
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 [...]
The Five Personalities and Retirement Planning
Wednesday, February 16th, 2011I received an interesting email this morning from a PR person for Allianz Life (I’m not getting paid to post this) about a study that Allianz conducted recently about Americans’ readiness for retirement. They also placed the respondents into five different categories or personalities. From the email: Allianz Life’s Reclaiming the Future study polled 3,247 [...]
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 [...]
If You’re 22 and You Want to Retire at 65, You Better Start Saving!
Thursday, September 23rd, 2010You just graduated from college and are setting up your household. Finances are probably going to be pretty tight. You may even want to put off contributing to your 401(k) plan because retirement is over 40 years away. My suggestion to you is: DON’T! Don’t put off planning for retirement. In fact, I think it [...]
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