Retirement Planning
Bob Carlson shares miscellaneous advice on retirement and related topics
Found 101 Articles.
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Retirement Planning: How Are You Doing?
Financial and retirement planning start with answering the question in the headline. After determining how you are doing, the next step is to define the actions that are needed to either help you do better or at least maintain your current status. Answering the first question is not as easy as many people suppose. Traditionally, […]
Planning Your Retirement: What’s Really Important?
Most people do their retirement planning backwards. They are guided that way by conventional advice and advisors. Retirement is more fulfilling and the planning is easier if the steps taken are a little different than those in the conventional planning process. The traditional retirement plan begins with money. The first step or series of steps […]
Setting Up Your Financial Protection Plan – Insurance
Hurricane Katrina has a lot of people thinking about their insurance for homes, autos, belongings, and personal liability. Most people have a lot of their insurance wrong. They have coverage gaps or are paying too much. Don’t wait until you need the coverage to discover there is a problem. Review your insurance every year or […]
Your Personal Backup Plan
A natural disaster destroys more than property. It also destroys financial records and other important documents. Many evacuees from Katrina say that they cannot even prove who they are, because they lost driver’s licenses, passports, birth certificates, and other identification in the hurricane and its aftermath. The traditional advice is to preserve important documents in […]
New Rules for Donating Used Cars
Plans need to be revised by taxpayers who intended to reap big tax breaks by donating used cars, boats, or planes to charity. Congress rewrote the law in 2004, and the IRS recently issued rules explaining the new law. Under the old law, a taxpayer could donate a used car to charity and deduct the […]
How to Ensure Your Pension Is Safe
The recent termination of the United Airlines pension plan put pension safety on the front burner. The news quickly was followed in Congress by hearings and reports on the underfunding of both corporate pension plans and the government guarantee agency, the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation. Most large companies offer some kind of a guaranteed pension […]
How Pension Payouts Are Affected By Interest Rates
The prospect of rising interest rates this year could affect retirement payouts. If your retirement plan offers a choice between an annuity and a lump sum and you were planning to retire in the next year or two, pay attention now. Lump sum payouts increase as interest rates fall and decrease as rates rise. The […]
How to Reap More From Selling a Business
Business sellers often leave a lot of money on the table. They pay extra taxes on the sale, because they do not use some key tax breaks. We’ll look at one of those strategies in this visit. There are two problems a business seller must solve. One is liquidity. The seller wants cash for the […]
