Sharing the following from Next Avenue, courtesy of Emily Brandon’s new book, Pensionless. It’s a great summary of key ages and dates important to the retirement planning timeline. These ages and dates are a bit like mile markers on your retirement road-map. Knowing the ramifications associated with each (i.e. the ability to contribute more, the age at which you can start taking benefits without penalty, the age and time by which you need to make distributions from your retirement accounts) are critical to one’s decisions made about and in retirement....
Retirement Planning for the Self-Employed
The nature of the job market has shifted coming out of the last recession. As unemployment stayed persistently high for a few years after the recovery, many chose to “go it alone” when employers weren’t hiring. As a result, those opting for self-employment and freelance work rose in numbers. Indeed today nearly a quarter of workers work for themselves, either full-time or part-time. They can make good money at it too, with almost half earning six figures.
There are plenty of perks to self-employment: you set your own hours, you choose who you work with, and you can spend all day in your pajamas and still bill hours if your business is set up that way. However, being self-employed also means you are responsible for providing yourself with your own benefits (i.e. healthcare, retirement plans, life insurance, etc.)....
The Cost of Student Debt to Retirement
As the school year winds down, high school seniors are making that crucial decision about which college they will be attending this Fall. I remember when I was in that similar position, and I can say with absolute certainty that my future ability to save for retirement was not even a blip on my decision-making matrix. Perhaps it should have been...
Women and Retirement
Recent news has been filled with the Equal Pay movement (Hollywood stars and the US Women’s National Soccer team among the most prominent). The statistic oft quoted regarding the gender wage gap is that women working full time in the United States typically are paid just 79 percent of what men were paid, a gap of 21 percent. The gap has narrowed since the 1970s (when it was 59 cents for every dollar earned by a man), due largely to women’s progress in education and workforce participation and to men’s wages rising at a slower rate. But progress has stalled in recent years, and the pay gap does not appear likely to go away on its own.
Equally as concerning is the implications this gap has on the prospects of women in retirement....