Double the trouble when divorced parents get old 10/19
"It's definitely not an easy situation, and there have been so many emotional hurdles," says Pope, an adviser with Albion Financial Group. "It's been a few years now, and it can be very discouraging. But that's how life is sometimes."
Now, when he pops over to his dad's place to catch a St. Louis Rams game, his mom is not there. And when he grabs dinner and a movie with his mom, his dad is not there. It is a sad ending for a couple who first met at a high-school football game, so many years ago.
Will Property Prices Need a Crutch as the Population Ages? September
Despite the popularity of various retirement investment vehicles, the largest part of most baby boomers' nest egg is still their homes.
Converting those real estate nest eggs into retirement cash could pose the prospect of a "correction" as the baby boomers become a sellers' demographic," according to Rosenfeld.
"The timing and severity of the Great Recession has interrupted this dynamic," Rosenfeld said. "First, home devaluations of 30% or more over the past five years have depleted home equity, making it undesirable-even infeasible-to sell in the current market.
We've seen this cause some retirees to describe themselves as "stuck" in their homes."
"What this has done is temporarily push back the onset of the disposition trend for baby boomers and made that trend more dependent upon the dynamics of the residential market than the age of the boomers," Rosenfeld said.
"A second effect is more lingering," Rosenfeld continued. "The Great Recession has caused many baby boomers to rethink their retirement plans. Boomers not only lost significant home equity, but also
had to dip into more liquid retirement savings. Many baby boomers suffered layoffs and significant reductions in household income during what should have been their prime earning years. The downturn has flattened and skewed the earnings curve for many boomers,
causing them to push back their retirement date or ratchet down their expectations."
Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital (Aug 29th)
Last May, in a much-touted speech in Iowa, Romney used language that was literally inflammatory to describe America's federal borrowing. "A prairie fire of debt is sweeping across Iowa and our nation," he declared. "Every day we fail to act, that fire gets closer to the homes and children we love." Our collective debt is no ordinary problem: According to Mitt, it's going to burn our children alive.
State Pensions Get High Fees, Low Profits—Study Aug, 10, 2012
According to the findings, state public pension funds spent over $7.8 billion in fees last year alone — a 15-percent increase over three years — despite the consistent failure of money managers to hit target returns or outperform passive equity index funds, which charge lower fees.
Study: Almost Half Of Americans Die With Less Than $10,000 In Assets
More than 46 percent of Americans find themselves with under $10,000 in financial assets by the time they die, according to a new study examining financial status among senior citizens. The study, “Were They Prepared For Retirement?,” looks at the connection between health and wealth and Americans’ increased reliance on the government.
The Old Get Richer, the Young Get Poorer
From 1984 to 2009, the median net worth of
older households rose 42%. For younger households, it declined by 68%.
• The gap in wealth between older and younger households widened over time. In 1984, the median net worth of older households was $108,000 higher than that of younger households. But by 2009, the median net worth of older households was $166,832 higher than that of younger households, the “largest (gap) in the 25 years that the government has been collecting this data.”
• In younger households, median adjusted annual income rose 27%, from $38,555 in 1967 to $49,145 in 2010. (Again, the figures are in 2010 dollars.) At the same time, income for older households rose 109%, from $20,804 to $43,401.
Steve Wozniak expresses reservations about cloud computing August 7, 2012
“I really worry about everything going to the cloud,” Wozniak told attendees of a performance of Mike Daisey’s “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” Saturday in Washington D.C., according to a report in Phys.org. ”I think it’s going to be horrendous.
I think there are going to be a lot of horrible problems in the next five years.”
America’s Retirement System Is Failing Us: Economist Aug 6, 2012
The majority of Americans (75 percent) nearing retirement age had less than $30,000 in their retirement accounts in 2010. For the poorest Americans in the 50-to-64-age bracket, the average amount saved for retirement was $16,034.
Aging baby boomers face home health care challenge Aug 5, 2012
Nearly half of all home care workers live at or below the poverty level, and many receive government benefits such as food stamps, unions and advocacy groups say. The median pay a year ago was $9.70 per hour — 4 cents less than fast-food workers and short-order cooks, according to the most recent statistics from the Labor Department.
"The real staffing challenge is 10 years away," said David Tramontana, president of Home Care by Black Stone in Cincinnati. "If we can't pay them more than they get at McDonald's, we're in big trouble."
Retirement Cities: Study Names The Best Places To Age In America 08/01/2012
Michael Hodin, executive director of the Global Coalition on Aging and adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who served as an advisor to the research team, puts it more strongly: According to him,
tapping into the economic potential of people over 50 will be imperative to any city that hopes to stay competitive into the coming decades. "The cities that are age-friendly will be 'the winners,'" he said.
Baby Boomers Facing Foreclosure at Higher Rate July 30th 2012
The study, entitled “Nightmare on Main Street: Older Americans and the Mortgage Market Crisis,” found that as of 2011 roughly 600,000 homeowners aged 50 or older were in foreclosure. That adds up to a total of 1.5 million borrowers losing their homes since the housing bubble popped in 2007.
There were also 625,000 in 2011 in the over-50 age group that were behind on their mortgage payments by three months or more. And 3.5 million baby boomers are currently underwater, owing more than their homes are worth.
“The housing market crisis is far from over,” the AARP report concluded. “…
The increases in mortgage borrowing and foreclosures indicate that many older homeowners have been relying on their home equity to finance their needs in retirement and may be running out of options.”
The best places to retire now
"Retirees today are looking at it with a sense of adventure as opposed to a sense of inevitability," says retirement consultant Maria Dwight. They may not weigh the pros and cons in terms of days of sunshine or number of golf courses, but rather the number of hiking and biking trails, the opportunity for educational enrichment, and the caliber of the art and restaurant scene.
Since so many are still working or would like the option to, a strong job market is a plus too.
Older workers capture more new jobs Older story
Since the start of the recession in December 2007, employment for those 55 and older is up by 3.9 million, even as total payrolls have fallen by 4.2 million.
It’s not that the recession has been easy on graying workers. Many older Americans laid off in the downturn won’t work again, says Sara Rix, senior adviser for the AARP Public Policy Institute. In Februrary, they were unemployed an average 54.1 weeks, vs. 39.1 weeks for all workers, Labor figures show.
Rather, their ranks are swelling as Baby Boomers age, and they’re working later in life, Rix says. The portion employed or looking for work jumped to 40.4% in February from 40.1% in January.
It’s up from 38.3% in February 2007. “What you are seeing is more people pushing back” retirement, Rix says.
ONE THIRD OF "TRANSITION BOOMERS" UNSURE ABOUT THEIR RETIREMENT INCOME NEEDS"
Although many boomers say they'll work in retirement, studies show that many may have difficulty doing so due to layoffs, health issues or the need to care for other family members," said Katie Libbe, vice president of consumer insights for Allianz Life. "When only 14% say they can count on guaranteed income from an annuity and 20% expect an inheritance or income from ‘other sources,' it's crucial for transition boomers to start thinking and talking about retirement income issues as soon as possible."
Unfortunately, many don't want to get started. According to the survey, 43% said they will not focus on retirement income strategies until they are less than five years from the start of retirement, and an astounding 16% said they are waiting until six months to one year prior. This means most transition boomers may not start planning far enough ahead to be able to make strategic choices about retirement income, Libbe said.
International monetary policy spillovers in an asymmetric world monetary system: The United States and China
The downsides of the extensive sterilization measures are
distortions in the financial as well as goods markets due to the fragmented interest rate structure (McKinnon/Schnabl 2012). The increased reserves requirements and the obligation of banks to purchase
sterilization bonds keep domestic monetary conditions tighter [and] higher than without central bank intervention (Greenwood 2008).
Bank of Japan buys record amount of stock ETFs (older but worth a look!!!)
But Japan’s monetary authority is almost unique among its peers in the major developed economies, in its high-profile purchases of ETFs, which it began in December 2010 as part of aggressive easing measures.
Fed Eyes Limiting Money-Market Fund Withdrawals (Jul 27, 2012)
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York said it supports limiting some types of money-market fund withdrawals in a bid to protect those funds from suffering the equivalent of a bank run.
Treasury Yield Is Six Basis Points From Low Before GDP ( Jul 27, 2012 )
Yields indicate investors are cutting bets on inflation as the expansion slows. The five-year, five-year forward break-even rate, a measure of expectations for prices that the Federal Reserve uses to guide monetary policy, fell to 2.39 percentage points on July 24, the least in four months and below the average of 2.75 for the past decade. Today’s GDP report may signal “danger” for the economy, said Tony Crescenzi at Pacific Investment Management Co., which runs the world’s biggest bond fund.
Housing Bubbling Like 2008 on $4 Trillion Stimulus: Mortgages (July 25)
“The Fed’s trying to save the day, yet it’s creating a lot of distortions both at home and internationally,” Mickey Levy, chief economist at Bank of America Corp. in New York, said by phone. “The Fed is understating the magnitude of these distortions,” such as rising real estate prices and low bond yields, he said.
The age of circular reasoning July 23rd 2012
It is a vicious spiralling situation, where US financial institutions will be forced to hold US Treasuries at 0% risk weight (i.e. at a masked loss), forcing them to raise capital, and likely undergoing the same path European banks underwent. And of course, interest rates, at least nominally, will spike. It is a scenario where the US housing market is negatively affected, corporates default and investment collapses, raising unemployment with productivity falling. This will not happen tomorrow, but it will happen sooner than most want to imagine.
Gen X and Social Security: Will We Choose to be Cynical or Practical?
That gap, by the way, is largely a result of growing income inequality. Social Security was reformed in 1983 to gradually increase payroll taxes and the retirement age to handle the Boomer's retirement wave. And as Robert Reich has pointed out, that fix would still be working if we were still hitting its target of taxing 90% of all wages.
We've dropped below taxing 90% of wages because more people and more wages are falling above the cap on Social Security taxes today than the 1983 fix predicted. In 2012, everyone pays the same Social Security tax rate on all earnings up to $110,100 and nothing at all on any earnings over that. My husband happens to be in the 6% of earners who fall into this category and that means that sometime in the fall his paycheck goes up because he's hit the cap and he and his employer stop contributing the tax. While that's nice for our bank account, it also strikes me as an unfair tax break for higher earners and means that as income inequality has grown overall, now only 84% of wages are subject to Social Security taxes leading to the long-term funding gap.
What Neither Candidate Will Admit -- Social Security Is Desperately Broke
The table's a bit hard to decipher, but it shows that the system is short $20.5 trillion in present value. It needs a 31 percent immediate and permanent increase in annual revenues to pay, over time, all of Social Security's promised benefits. That's close to a 4 percentage-point payroll tax hike! If we wait 20 years, the 31 percent figure rises to 50 percent, which translates into a 6.2 percentage-point tax hike.
Treasuries Doomsday Is Four Years Away For Vanguard (7/6/2012 ****)
“There’s very little upside, but there’s all kinds of downside,” Stokes said. “There’s a finite timeline to some of the issues that we’re facing. It’s no longer that we can keep kicking the can down the road,” she said in reference to lawmakers who keep raising the nation’s $16.4 trillion debt ceiling instead of reducing borrowing.
UK borrowing costs at all-time low as investors seek 'safe haven' (July 24th)
Vincent Forest, an economist at the Economist Intelligence Unit, said: "The economic contraction is now accelerating and will have a significant negative impact on public revenue. In addition, social unrest has begun gathering pace over the past weeks, and could escalate further when the austerity measures begin to bite."
Three years after the Great Recession officially ended, the American economy can't maintain momentum. For the third straight year, growth has stalled at mid-year after getting off to a promising start.
Unemployment stood at 8.2 percent in June — the 41st straight month it's been above 8 percent.
State Retirement Benefit Gap Getting Wide (June 22, 2012)
The 2010 shortfall in public pension and healthcare benefits was nearly $1.4 trillion, according to a report from the Pew Charitable Trusts. That's the difference between what the states have on hand and the benefit obligations they have promised to pay retirees.
The specter of downward mobility in retirement is a looming reality for both middle- and higher-income workers. Almost half of middle-class workers, 49 percent, will be poor or near poor in retirement, living on a food budget of about $5 a day.
Baby Boomers: Con Artists are Targeting You (Jul 20, 2012 )
"Most of the fraud that we see is conducted by people who don't have proper licensing and sell unregistered securities," Webster says.
Promissory notes marketed to individual investors are a popular type of unregistered security pitched to seniors by con artists, says Lori Schock, director of the Securities and Exchange Commission's office of investor education and advocacy.
"It's an outright fraud," Schock says. "Generally speaking, promissory notes aren't sold to individual investors."
Affinity fraud: Other types of investment scams include affinity fraud, where con artists infiltrate a senior club or organization, create a bond with seniors and then pitch a fraudulent investment.
The Next iPhone – Slimmer, Lighter?
Millions of aging baby boomers have cracked into their nest egg – raiding their 401(k)s and other retirement funds because they need the money now. A new study from the non-profit Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies finds only one in 10 displaced workers is very confident about the ability to retire comfortably.
Pensions Are Becoming Tomorrow's Financial Crisis
The very first thing the report reveals is that pension fund liabilities and underfunding are both at record levels. Because of flat performance for U.S. stocks and double-digit losses in many international markets, the amount by which pensions are underfunded soared from $245 billion in 2010 to $355 billion in 2011. That left pensions less than 79% funded last year, compared to nearly 84% funding levels two years ago.
There will be a 33 per cent increase in the number of people retiring between now and 2014. Stuart Barton of Challenger Financial Services believes the majority will want immediate access to all savings."People have been waiting all of their lives to get their hands on this cash and various studies have shown most people take all of their money out as soon as they can" he said. "The majority of cash is taken out to pay off the mortgage or buy an investment property, even to give to kids or go on big holidays."
As the chart below illustrates, the costs of eldercare are rising faster than the growth of gross domestic product. The Social Security and Medicare parts alone, at 8.5% of GDP last year, will nearly double their share in 50 years, and keep rising from there.
The fact that net worth declined for younger age groups even before the Great Recession is remarkable when you consider that the economy grew by a third on a per capita inflation-adjusted basis between 1989 and 2010, though this growth was not widely shared. Furthermore, families should have been saving more to make up for declines in pension coverage and Social Security benefits. As a result, the Center for Retirement Research has estimated that the average family in the broad 35-64 age range had a Retirement Income Deficit of $90,000 in 2010, a measure of how far behind they were in saving and accumulating benefits for retirement.
It says if public-sector net debt, which stood at 66.1% of GDP in March 2012, is to return to its pre-financial crisis level of 40% of GDP by 2061, the government will need to implement permanent tax increases or spending cuts worth GBP17.1 billion in 2017/2018.The government has made it clear that it intends to press ahead with further pension reform despite resistance from unions, who have staged a number of mass strikes to protest the reforms over the past year.
Kahlua Chocolate Cream Pie (testing)
It is also a bit Twilight Zone: the development's scale and isolation make it feel more like a colony than a community. Almost everyone is old, almost everyone drives a golf cart — they outnumber cabs in New York City by a factor of four — and almost everyone is white. But retirees of Hahnfeldt's generation, who are reshaping notions of what it means to be old, say that it sure beats the life they left behind.
