Retirement Planning
When to Claim Social Security at 62, 67 or 70
Take a worker whose full benefit at 67 would be 2,000 dollars a month. Claim at 62 and the check is 1,400 dollars.
In 2022 a broad US bond index fund lost about 13 percent, its worst calendar year in decades. Plenty of people who had bought it as the "safe" part of their portfolio were stunned.
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Retirement Planning
Take a worker whose full benefit at 67 would be 2,000 dollars a month. Claim at 62 and the check is 1,400 dollars.
Taxes Simplified
About 95 percent of married couples in the United States file a joint return, and most of them never run the numbers on the...
Investing for Beginners
Say you just received a 12,000 dollar inheritance, a bonus or the proceeds from selling a car, and you have already decided it...
Retirement Planning
The average American worker changes jobs about every four years.
Games
Few things teach the feel of risk as quickly as a game.
Taxes Simplified
A reader emailed me last spring with a familiar shock.
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Three writers who each spent years on a different side of a money decision: a former family financial planner who got tired of budget templates that assume nobody has an irregular paycheck, a one-time collections rep who now explains what a credit report actually shows, and someone who has tracked her own index fund returns since she was twenty four and writes from that spreadsheet, not a textbook. Every article carries a byline, and the numbers shown are worked through, not rounded to make a point.