When William Bengen embarked on his study of safe withdrawal rates from a retiree’s portfolio in 1994, he operated on a couple of key assumptions – 1) that a 30-year time horizon seemed a conservatively long enough period to assume one would live in retirement and 2) past performance of the U.S. financial markets could reflect future probabilities...

Average hourly wages for American workers increased more in August than July — 0.3 percent, versus 0.2 percent the month before, according to the Labor Department. That pushed the yearly hourly wage increase to 2.2 percent from 2.0 percent....

The need for long-term care planning grows more and more pressing each year. The combination of people living longer and costs of such care rising rapidly have contributed to the growing need. Here are some bare facts:

• A healthy 65-year-old has at least a 40% chance of living into his or her 90s, according to AgeLab, a research program within MIT’s School of Engineering that works with business, government and NGOs to improve the quality of life of older people. And six in 10 men and eight in 10 women will need chronic care...

I often feel like most of what I bring to your attention tends to highlight more of what’s wrong with our retirement preparedness than what’s right. So to change things up a bit, here’s a great article from US News and World Report I wanted to share about how early retirement can make your life better.

Being able to help a client retire earlier than they originally planned is probably one of the most rewarding aspects of my job. Early retirement is not an impossible goal - the caveat, of course, is that achieving it takes a lot of saving, investment and planning discipline. If you’re able to achieve it, you’ll often find that retirement very rewarding...