Search results for boomers
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Posted
Jul 20 2009, 01:45 PM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This guest post comes from Frank Curmudgeon at Bad Money Advice.
I'd been hoping for a Brett Arends column I could say something nice about, and I got my wish in the form of "Baby boomers to kids: Kiss your inheritance goodbye." The theme of the article, or the first few paragraphs anyway, is the trend of dropping a nice inheritance for the kiddies from the retirement plan in reaction to the market swoon.
I myself am just a bit too young to be a baby boomer and my parents just a little too old, so I am merely an outside observer on this one. But I have to ask those kids of boomers out there: You were expecting to inherit something? From the Me Generation? Really?
A few paragraphs into Arends' column, he abruptly starts talking about annuities. This may seem like a non sequitur, but it follows nicely from the idea that retirees may be jettisoning the legacy for the children from their planning.
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Posted
Jul 06 2009, 08:35 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This guest post comes from Mr. GoTo at Go To Retirement.
Our vacation home is on a lake in a rural area. The nearest small town is a 20-minute drive. Although we do not live on a farm or have lots of land, it is a country lifestyle with a waterfront bonus. When we spend time here, I often think about the positive and negative aspects of retirement in a small town or rural community.
Benefits
Our neighbors across the street retired years ago and live at the lake full time. Our neighbors next door are retiring this summer and plan on living at the lake after they sell their city home and farm. That has caused me to think even more about the combination of small town country living and retirement for us.
Cost of living. Food is more expensive in our local grocery stores. If we were to drive another 30 minutes, we can find larger chain groceries with lower prices. When we start living here for longer periods, that might make sense.
Everything else that we buy in our rural community seems to be less expensive, including utilities, insurance, and maintenance services. I think that a lot of that is related to real estate. The land is cheaper, houses cost less, and property taxes are lower compared with city living. This flows into all other cost-of-living categories.
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Posted
May 07 2009, 10:48 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This guest post comes from Frank Curmudgeon at Bad Money Advice.
A reader named Trent pointed me to a story that "60 Minutes" did recently, "Retirement dreams disappear with 401(k)s." It's not their best work, and I'm not one who thinks much of their best work.
Helpfully, the CBS Web site gives a near transcript of it, so I can easily quote the way over-the-top copy read by the reporter, Steve Kroft.
It was a gray, chilly morning in midtown Manhattan and a line of unemployed, mostly white-collar workers stretched for blocks around the Radisson Hotel. More than 1,000 middle managers, stockbrokers, consultants, secretaries and receptionists had come hoping to find a job.
It was called a career fair, but there was no merriment -- only a whiff of desperation.
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Posted
Mar 25 2009, 08:17 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This guest post comes from Mr. ToughMoneyLove at Tough Money Love.
What goes around, comes around. How many times have you heard that phrase used as a subtle threat or reminder of another's misbehavior?
Boomeranger. That's a word that baby boomers invented to label -- in a semi-demeaning sort of way -- adult children who return to their parents' home to escape the realities of their own financial problems. (I actually don't think that all boomerangers should be demeaned, but that's another topic for another day.)
I have a new phrase to talk about: the boomer boomeranger.
Now that the retirement nest eggs of many baby boomers have been crushed by falling markets, some of those boomers are a future threat to boomerang on their adult children. Retirement Plan A (or for some boomers, Plan Zero) has failed. Retirement Plan B may become "mooch off my kids."
Mr. ToughMoneyLove has some thoughts about how to dodge a boomeranger parent. First, a little background.
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Posted
Feb 03 2009, 01:52 PM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This guest post comes from Mr. ToughMoneyLove at Tough Money Love.
Baby boomers have been receiving a lot of criticism in recent months for their collective contributions to our country's economic problems.
First, we are blamed for an extreme amount of debt-driven consumption that inflated highly leveraged real estate and credit bubbles. Second, we are now being blamed for an excess of saving when many so-called economic experts are calling for increased consumer spending. In general, boomers are probably guilty on both counts.
I have a suggestion.
Instead of wasting energy hurling insults at financially irresponsible baby boomers, why don't we make a list of all the money mistakes that were made by the boomer generation? The younger folks can read the list and then pledge "never again." I hereby volunteer to start the list of boomer mistakes. Here we go:
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Posted
Dec 15 2008, 05:05 PM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
What's the best route as you near retirement: Use extra money to pay off the mortgage or pad your investments? That question deserves a new look in light of the economic events of 2008, argues Mr. GoTo, a baby boomer and blogger who comes down on the side of paying off the house. The No. 1 reason: A guaranteed rate of return of 6% (or whatever your mortgage rate is) tax-free. "Compare that to what we have experienced in the markets recently," Mr. GoTo says.
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Posted
Jul 14 2008, 11:26 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
Jesse at You Need a Budget has a 4-month-old daughter, Lydia, and is concerned about how to raise her properly. He's deeply worried about what he sees as an American trend. In a post that pulls no punches on a subject many others might dance around, he writes: "I'm sure it's partly my own biases, seeing things through my own lens, but it seems society is bent on making our kids the softest, weakest, most selfish, spoiled brats the world has ever known. Are we raising a Generation Y-Me?" His answer: Yes.
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Posted
Mar 24 2008, 11:29 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
Grace's post at GRACEful Retirement will sound familiar to many aging boomers watching the effect of Wall Street gyrations on their retirement accounts. Grace is 58 and playing catch-up after getting a late start on socking away money for her hopefully golden years. "I started this blog last July with $176,000 in retirement savings. Now I'm down to $146,000, notwithstanding the money I keep putting in," writes Grace, who plans to retire in 10 years. That drop, "when I allow myself to think about it, scares me to death." Yet she continues to invest $1,025 a month in index and growth funds. She tells herself she's right to keep buying when the market is down because it inevitably will come back up. She asks, "When do I find out if I passed the test?"
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Posted
Jan 09 2008, 02:33 PM
by
Karen Datko
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
Plenty of people have paid big bucks to live in gated communities, thinking they've insulated themselves from some of life's problems. Author Barbara Ehrenreich, in a post at Barbara's Blog and AlterNet, said that isn't necessarily so. "There are studies indicating that there are no differences in the crime in gated communities and non-gated communities," she wrote. They also aren't immune to the recent wave of foreclosures. She correctly observes that "there's no fence high enough to keep out the repo man."
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Posted
Oct 04 2007, 10:20 AM
by
Karen Datko
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from partner blo g Blueprint for Financial Prosperity . The “ latte factor ” was a term coined by David Bach to represent the idea that the key to financial prosperity is to cut out the little things in life you're paying other people for, and spend that money on yourself and your future. Mathematically, it involves taking a $5 cup of coffee each day, or other discretionary spending you'd like to substitute in its place, and calculating how much that $5 would be worth in 40 years if you had invested it. It's not a particularly novel idea because everyone can appreciate that saving $5 each day and then compounding that at 11 percent each year for 40 years will result in a huge number. But its value is that it challenges you to examine the motivations behind your spending and how you could change those for the better. It all adds up When you make a large capital purchase, like a house, a car, or even a plasma television, you spend quite a bit of time researching in order to
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