I’ve had many conversations with families about the details of Social Security spousal benefits. The rules can be confusing, and the benefit of getting the decision right, such as when and how to file for Social Security spousal benefits, can make a significant impact on your lifetime Social Security benefit.
In this article I’ll take a closer look at this important aspect of Social Security. It impacts most of my clients’ decisions around Social Security, and may benefit yours as well.
Budgeting can be a valuable exercise for any family, whether you’re just scraping by or you have a nice cash cushion month to month. But “month to month” is one of the key assumptions of most budgets. Since most of us get paid on a twice-monthly or monthly schedule, it makes sense to budget across the same time period.
This works fine for most expenses like your mortgage payment, utilities, groceries, shopping, and clothing purchases, but what about large, irregular expenses?
Cyber crime is on the rise. It’s costing people like you and me very real money, well into the billions of dollars world-wide. Cyber criminals are growing increasingly clever, with new tools and techniques being developed to deceive.
One of the biggest tragedies of this type of crime is who it primarily targets: seniors living on a fixed income. Since the vast majority of my clients are age 50 and above, I wanted to dedicate some time today to exploring a few recommendations to help keep your financial accounts secure.
This will certainly go down as one of the most interesting investment years in recent memory. There’s been a lot of pain felt with inflation pressure and a falling stock market and bond market.
But there have been some silver linings, too. One of those is that bonds, money market funds, CDs, savings accounts and other “fixed income” type financial products are paying considerably more interest than even 6 to 12 months ago. Here are a few charts to illustrate that “bonds are back,” and how investors can take advantage of the opportunity.