Workforce50.com serves older workers with a full service job board and career site. All jobs are placed by employers specifically interested in staffing from the over-50 workforce. Our employment and education resources cater to mature workers searching for employment, in transition or approaching retirement.
Workforce50.com is advocating for improved utilization of our Nation's 50+ workforce.
Personal Finance Approaching Retirement
Financial decisions get more difficult as we approach our retirement years. Our lives are still changing at least as rapidly as they used to, and often more so. We have accumulated a lifetime of financial resources and obligations, with new complications arising as we contemplate pensions, Social Security, Medicare, etc. Our earning years may be shortening, but our spending years will go on indefinitely – yet without our knowing how long or how expensive they will be. We may also have children or parents or others for whom we feel some responsibility. There are no easy answers, but in these columns, Chuck illuminates the questions, and indicates where answers might be found – even if these are sometimes off the beaten track.
Why People Over 50 Can’t Get Good Financial Advice
Most of the financial information you get is correct. But most of the advice is not correct, or at least not right for you. There are two main reasons for this: the nature of advice providers, and the nature of your financial situation.
Aggressive or Conservative Investing as You Get Older?
Over the past decade or so, quite a few financial institutions and individual advisors have been promoting the idea that, even in retirement, we should all continue to invest aggressively. Why?
Providing Financially for your Special Needs Family Member
If you have a child, sibling, or other family member who is cognitively or physically disabled and unable to provide for him/herself financially, you have a more complex retirement situation than most.
Should You Plan on Signing Up for Social Security at Age 62?
About half of people eligible for Social Security retirement benefits sign up for them at age 62, which is the earliest eligibility age. Many financial experts actually advise this, but in most cases it is not the best choice.
About Those Monte Carlo Analyses…
If, when I say "Monte Carlo," you think of gambling in Monaco, or a certain model of Chevrolet, then you probably haven't talked with a professional financial advisor about managing your retirement finances. And in some ways, maybe that's just as well.
Turning Savings into Guaranteed Lifetime Income
There are two traditional ways to make sure you never run out of income in retirement: (1) never spend your principal, and just live off the income from your savings; and (2) buy an annuity.
Why You Lose Money in the Stock Market
Stocks go up and down, but over the long haul, the trend has been up - way up - and it has been this way for generations. That being so, why do so many of us actually lose money in the stock market?
When Grown Children Move Back Home
Whether a grown child moves back in with you for your sake or for his or her own sake, it's a big step, and there are numerous issues to consider.
Chuck Yanikoski
Chuck is President of Still River Retirement Planning Software, Inc. (StillRiverRetire.com). He has been in the financial (and financial software) industries since 1976. He is also the principal founder of the Association for Integrative Financial and Life Planning (www.AIFLP.org).
Chuck’s particular interest in retirement goes back to 1980, when his 62-year-old father, a brilliant engineer, asked whether Chuck thought he could retire right away. This is when Chuck first realized that even the smartest people are generally not expert in the many financial decisions that have to be made when approaching retirement. (Today the elder Yanikoski is in his 90s and still solvent.)
In the early 1990s, during an 18-year career at New England Mutual Life home office, Chuck discovered that no financial company was really trying to serve folks who were retiring or getting ready for it, and every year, therefore, a huge new group of people, uncertain and confused about the choices before them, were retiring almost entirely on their own. This has changed for the better since then, but not enough.
Chuck also came to realize that the financial decisions we make around retirement not only are complicated individually, but are intertwined, making the analysis too complicated to do except with very smart software (which, of course, did not exist); that it was especially important to make these decisions in a smart way, because once people have been retired for a while, it is often impossible to make up for earlier mistakes; and that since most people would never get the kind of individualized advice that the wealthy can afford, we need a very smart software tool that is accessible to almost anyone. Since 2003, Chuck and his colleagues have built such a tool, called RetirementWorks II, available at the RetirementWORKS, Inc. website (www.RetirementWorks2.com).
Meanwhile, Chuck has come to appreciate that non-financial decisions are at least as important, complex, and intertwined as financial decisions, and that they are also inseparable from financial decisions. So his present quest is to enable the software to deal intelligently with health, personal attitudes, family and social relationships, meaning and purpose, living arrangements, geographical location, work, leisure, and other issues. This ambitious project will perhaps be ready in 2014.
Meanwhile, you can reach Chuck at csy@StillRiverRetire.com.