Retirement Watch Lighthouse Logo

Retirement Articles

Found 3622 Articles.
Get access to 4359 articles by subscribing to Retirement Watch and Retirement Watch Spotlight Series.

The State of Retirement

April 16, 2012

Another survey of Americans in or near retirement has rolled out. This one is worth paying attention to because it’s not done by a financial services firm with an agenda to boost its business. Instead, the Society of Actuaries did another edition of a survey it’s been doing periodically for a while. The survey covers […]

Stocks Aren’t for the Long Run

April 11, 2012

Professor Robert Shiller of “irrational exuberance” fame is back making headlines, this time in an interview with Money magazine. Another of Shiller’s innovations is the Shiller P/E ratio. Instead of using forecasts of next year’s earnings, Shiller suggests using normalized earnings, which he defines as basically an average of the last 10 year’s earnings. That […]

Is a Target Date Fund for You?

April 10, 2012

The growing trend among mutual fund families and especially in 401(k) plans is the target date fund (TDF). These are asset allocation funds that assume the investors will reach retirement age at a certain year, hence the name Target Date. There’s an ongoing debate over whether the funds are good for investors. The idea is […]

The Search for Stock Market Patterns

April 9, 2012

It’s tough to identify the one mistake that is the worst or most common investors make. But my vote is the desire to identify patterns in the markets and use those to develop rules of investing. There are a few people who do this successfully. But they have very elaborate rules that take many factors […]

SUBSCRIBE TO Lifetime Retirement Protection Program

Bob’s exclusive new service gives members the tools and knowledge to maximize their retirement finances for the rest of their lives. The Lifetime Retirement Protection Program includes all monthly issues of Bob’s Retirement Watch newsletter, all monthly video webinars in his Retirement Watch Spotlight service, every one of Bob’s premium reports and white papers (past and future), complete access to RetirementWatch.com, and 90 days’ membership in Eagle Financial’s DividendInvestor.com. Click here now to access all of Bob Carlson’s research.

Good Strategy or a Contrarian Signal?

April 2, 2012

Large corporate pension funds have more of their portfolios invested in bonds than in equities for the first time in over a decade, according to pension consulting firm Milliman. Like individual investors, the pension funds don’t like what they see in stocks. There’s a lot of volatility and downside risk, and the positive potential isn’t […]

Student Loans in Retirement

April 2, 2012

Will your Social Security benefits be garnished to pay student loans? Apparently, that’s no unusual, according to a story in The Washington Post. The Federal Reserve, which tracks the details of household assets and liabilities, says Americans age 60 and over owe $36 billion on their student loans, and about 10% of that debt is […]

Picking IRA Beneficiaries

April 1, 2012

Many people make serious mistakes when naming beneficiaries for IRAs and similar accounts. Talk to almost any financial planner or estate planner and you’ll hear wild stories. People often have no beneficiaries named. Or a divorced or deceased spouse is the primary beneficiary. Some of the mistakes are so bad they end up in court. […]

April 2012

April 1, 2012

April 27, 2012 04:20 p.m. Your Retirement Finance Week in Review Big decisions soon need to be made by policymakers and investors. As I’ve said the last few weeks, a wave of economic and market forces are coming together and forming a critical mass that’s creating a lot of stress on the system. It’s not […]

pixel

Log In

Forgot Password

Search