Everyone and their dog has probably already googled the phrase, “Where is my stimulus check?”. But in case you’re still in the dark, here is a summary article from Money magazine that goes over the salient points about getting the check and common error messages: https://money.com/wheres-my-stimulus-check-get-my-payment-status-not-available/ If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me. … [Read more...]

 Do I have the right percentage of stocks/growth?If I were to do it all over again and go back in time, would I have the same % stocks, same strategy?  When you achieve desired recovery, what will you change? Actual alignment with Buckets and Tools approach?If I were to do it all over again and go back in time, would I divide all my money up accd to BAT approach, would I do put a different percentage? When you achieve desired recovery, what will you change?  Is … [Read more...]

There are a handful of educators that I follow regularly. One of them is David McKnight. He is an expert in the area of tax-free retirement and how to get to the 0% tax bracket. He has been beating the drum for years that tax rates will increase significantly in the future, in fact they have to. Here is the link to a recent podcast he did on why now is the perfect time to use a Roth … [Read more...]

Today I read about a portion of the new stimulus bill that I was unaware of before which relates to an improvement for the way that charitable giving is treated. Previously, most charitable giving was not being deducted from taxable income due to the large standard deduction that generally was larger than itemized deductions (where charitable giving is found). One provision of the new stimulus bill allows for a "above the line" deduction for the first $300 of charitable giving. This means … [Read more...]

A common human response to fear is to pull back. That's normal and natural in the physical world. We must protect ourselves from real danger and real harm. In the investing world, it's a little bit more counter intuitive. When prices are falling, the most common temptation is to bail. It begins to feel like putting money into the market has no purpose, as if it just evaporates. In actuality, the story is not so simple. Maybe the best way to describe it would be with a metaphor… Imagine … [Read more...]

It can be overwhelming and intimidating to determine the best strategy and tools to supplement your regular income in retirement, that difference between your predictable retirement expenses and your predictable retirement income. Most retirees will have some gap that must be funded each month. In this article, let's talk about the broad categories of tools that can meet this goal. Guaranteed Income Annuities A popular way to cover an income gap is through an income annuity. At the … [Read more...]

How much should you plan on spending each year in retirement? Does the amount that you're going to spend change over time? Does it go up? Does it go down? Plan on three spending phases in retirement and an appropriate amount of spending for each. How I describe them comes from Tom Hegna in his video below: Using Tom's description, we want to plan for having more money during the GO GO years. Will most likely want to spend more on entertainment, vacations, going out to eat, … [Read more...]

In our previous articles, we introduced the Buckets and Tools Approach to Retirement Planning. In essence, we categorize each dollar available for retirement among the four necessary priorities of liquidity, income, protection risk, and growth. Once we have all of our assets into the right buckets, how do we decide which strategy works best to achieve liquidity, create income, protect from risk, and grow our assets? In other words is there always a single best tool to cover my income gap? … [Read more...]

In order to delay Social Security, it requires a bridge of income while delaying, assuming that you have retired. There are many options for building this bridge, but many feel that they are giving something up in the process of delaying their Social Security benefits. Primarily they may see it as a trade-off of having to deplete their investment assets during the years that they delay. What if you didn't have to deplete the principle of your investments while you delay Social Security? … [Read more...]

If you're unfamiliar with The Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP), I suggest you read this article that I wrote about it. Most of the time, the WEP will affect individuals who have a pension from a local, state or federal entity. Recently I ran into a circumstance where the WEP impacted an individual who had both American and Canadian citizenship. Canada has a similar system to Social Security, the Canadian Pension Plan or CPP. It is very similar in many respects including the age for … [Read more...]