“You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.”
― Abraham Lincoln

I thought some words of wisdom from our 16th president were in order given the following article from The Street about our inability to overcome the procrastination bug when it comes to retirement. The telling statistic – while 59% set the goal to save for retirement in 2015, less than a third of those people achieved it...

The National Association of Personal Financial Advisors (NAPFA) recently released the results of a poll conducted among its members listing the best advice for people 5, 10 and 20 years away from retirement. Though not one of the members asked, the findings were similar themes I stress with clients, such as maximizing retirement savings, minimizing taxes when possible and planning for a longer time horizon than you’d expect....

One last bit of updating from the IRS for 2016, dealing with estate and gifting exemption maximums. It looks like you can pass on a little bit more to your heirs tax-free starting next year: estate and gift tax exemptions have been increased to $5.45 million per person (up from $5.43 million in 2015)....

It appears that there is another casualty of the government’s inflation calculation that will affect retirement: due to the cost-of living index not reaching the threshold that would have triggered an upward adjustment, the Internal Revenue Service announced Wednesday that retirement plan contribution limits would remained unchanged for 2016....