Simple Ideas to Keep Your Retirement on Track

Nora Eisenhower writing for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has three easy steps to help keep your retirement on track. 1) Plan for your mortgage payoff date 2)Be careful when getting a new mortgage, refinancing, or tapping your home equity 3) Estimate your retirement income and expenses. Click for the full article. This is simple stuff folks, but it amazing how challenging it is for many Americans.

Summer Rally?

From Mark Hulbert on statistical reality of summer rally:

Since 1940, for example, the average Dow gain from the end of May to its highest close over the next three months is just 4.0%. Seven of the other 11 months of the calendar sport higher average “rallies” than that.

Read the article here.

A Little Retirement Perspective

Morningstar recently published this article with advice about retirement from other retirees. The goal of the article is to discuss the answers to the question: How do you transition from accumulation mode to spending those hard-earned dollars you've worked so hard to amass?

Medicare's Beneficiaries and their Financial State

The Kaiser Family Foundation recently released a study analyzing the finances of people on Medicare. There findings add to the argument that we have a retirement crisis coming to America. The entire study is interesting and eye opening. Please read the issue brief. It will summarize the topic for you.

The Future of Investment Management?

The NY Times ran a story recently discussing companies that are using technology to help investors. Most of the services create diversified portfolios with rebalancing features for a relatively low monthly or annual fee. There is a table in the article that summarizes what some of these companies offer. I found it interesting that Vanguard is in this space but Schwab and Fidelity aren't listed.

U.S. Next Big Crisis will be a Retirement Crisis

Brett Arends educates us once again. This time he writes about a crisis that needs to be on most Americans radar. We simply have not done a great job with the retirement experiment in the United States. From his recent article:

Do the math: According to an EBRI survey conducted last year, 66% of workers have saved less than $50,000 for their retirement. And 28% have saved less than $1,000. Good luck with that.

The full article mentions three new reports that document how unprepared Americans are for retirement. We need new systems to help Americans save for retirement, and I am not sure MyRA will really help that much (but it certainly cannot make this situation worse).

Will 1929 Parallel Continue, We'll Know by June

Charting can be entertaining. I don't put a lot of trust in people that find similar patterns because the charts are similar sometimes, but never the same. That said, here is the latest chart watch as brought to our attention by Mark Hulbert from Marketwatch.