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The State of the (Retirement) Union is Weak
Tweet Share on Facebook March 13, 2012 Comment (1)Americans continue to be stressed about their retirements, according to the 2012 Retirement Confidence Survey (RCS), a major annual survey of employee expectations and retiree realities. Since the 2007-08 recession, retirement confidence has hovered for several years at or near the lowest levels recorded by the RCS since it began in 1990. Last year was no different.
[See 10 Steps to Fine-Tune Your Retirement Plan.]
For people still working, slightly more than half were either very confident (14 percent) or somewhat confident (38 percent) they would be able to retire comfortably. For people either retired or at least 65 years old, the picture was a bit better: 21 percent said they were very confident of a comfortable retirement and 42 percent said they were somewhat comfortable.
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Financial Exhaustion Hitting Many Seniors
Tweet Share on Facebook March 12, 2012 Comment (1)On paper, consumer price inflation has been tame, personal incomes are modestly higher, and measures of senior poverty are reassuringly low. But in the real world, prices for many consumer items are much higher, especially in poorer neighborhoods without Wal-Marts and other price-conscious retailers. Incomes for many seniors are not rising. And many older households are experiencing what can best be called financial exhaustion.
[See 10 Ways to Boost Your Social Security Checks.]
Many older consumers have scrimped during their retirement years to make ends meet. While they make enough money to avoid poverty, they have never had much of a cushion. Now, with nest eggs depleted and home values still depressed, they are running out of painless financial sacrifices.
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How to be Environmentally Green Even in Death
Tweet Share on Facebook March 9, 2012 CommentJohn McQueen may ask potential customers if they want "flame" or "flameless"—hardly the menu selections expected at a mortuary. But the world of consumer choice has come to the funeral industry. And the choice being offered is between a funeral process using traditional cremation in a high-temperature chamber and a new process that uses pressure-heated water and chemicals to achieve the same results.
[See 10 Top Cities for Senior Living.]
McQueen heads and owns the Anderson-McQueen Funeral Home, a group of funeral homes based in St. Petersburg, Fla. His father founded the business and McQueen recalls that when his dad died about 25 years ago, the company's funeral mix was about 75 percent earth burials and 25 percent cremations. Today, those percentages are reversed. That's well above the national average, but McQueen cites industry projections that cremation will overtake burial as the dominant form of funeral process before the end of this decade.
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Top 10 U.S. Cities for Well-Being
Tweet Share on Facebook March 7, 2012 Comment (3)Ask people how they feel about themselves and odds are, you'll get the most positive responses from people who live in metro areas with universities and in the West, according to Gallup's annual survey of national well-being.
[See 10 New Retirement Hot Spots.]
Gallup looked at 190 metro areas using a scale in which 100 represented ideal resident perceptions of their living conditions. The top 10 metros in overall well-being are:
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Is Retirement Advice Biased Against You?
Tweet Share on Facebook March 6, 2012 Comment (4)Have you ever seen an investment firm message that our retirements are on track and we should just head to the beach? Me neither. Up to a point, a certain amount of "sky is falling" rhetoric is not surprising. However, one critic of standard investment advice thinks there is more going on here.
[In Pictures: The Best Places to Retire in 2012.]
Austin Nichols is a senior research associate at the Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank that does a lot of research on economic issues. In a recent paper, Nichols takes aim at the notion that people should try to achieve retirement incomes that are roughly 80 percent of their pre-retirement incomes.
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Fraud: A Boomer Growth Industry
Tweet Share on Facebook March 5, 2012 Comment (2)Famed bank robber Willie Sutton was credited with saying decades ago that he selected his particular line of work "because that's where the money is." Sutton said he never uttered the famous phrase, but it rings true today with the nation's rising numbers of seniors: They are where the money is. They are also often perceived as easy marks. And with the rise of the Internet and online transactions, everyone's computer or mobile app may look like an open bank vault to a cyber crook.
The Federal Trade Commission recently released its annual report on consumer complaints. The overall volume of complaints in 2011 jumped by more than 24 percent from 2010 to more than 1.8 million. Identity theft topped the list of complaints for the second straight year, accounting for about 15 percent of all complaints. About a quarter of identity theft complaints involved alleged tax or wage fraud.
Here are the top 10 types of complaints received in 2011 by the agency, and their share of total complaints:
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Best and Worst Places for Senior Money Security
Tweet Share on Facebook March 1, 2012 CommentSenior poverty rates have steadily improved in recent decades and now are the lowest of any major demographic group in the country. While the safety net may be working for the nation's poorest seniors, there is a much larger group of older Americans that does not qualify for low-income benefits. The only safety net for these people is their own income, and the picture is not pretty.
[See 10 Places to Retire on Social Security Alone.]
Wider Opportunities for Women (WOW), a Washington nonprofit, has just finished work on a national study about what older Americans spend each year on basic necessities, primarily housing, food, transportation, and healthcare. WOW calls the figure its Elder Index—a "getting by" spending total for people who do not receive any government support payments. The index was developed by the Gerontology Institute at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
