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Nearly Half Of Us Couldn't Live A Month On Our Savings Trae Bodge , RetailMeNot's The Real Deal Apr. 1, 2014, 5:56 PM April is Financial Literacy Month (and dreaded tax time), so let’s talk about your financial know-how. Are you financially prepared if you need to stop working for a few months due to a layoff or illness? Do you know how much money you have lying around? What about your kids? Are you setting them on a path to financial health? RetailMeNot recently polled more than 1,000 Americans and found that overall consumers are doing pretty well on...

We recently pointed out that starting to save early for retirement is extremely helpful, and also a useful chart showing how much you should have saved at different stages of your career to ensure a comfortable retirement. To show how these ideas work, we figured out how much money you would have to set aside monthly, starting at different ages, and under different rates of return, to end up with $1,000,000 in savings when you are ready to retire at 65. Here is how much you would need to save each month at a 6% annual rate of return, starting...

If you have a modest income, you've probably been asking yourself how you will ever be able to find the money to start saving. So here it is: Provided your income is low enough, the federal government will pay you to stash money away for your retirement — giving you as much as $1,000. The deal comes through what's known as the “saver's credit.” You can find it buried in the tax return you do each year, and if you use the free tax preparation software the government gives people with incomes below $58,000, locating the saver's credit will be...

President Barack Obama plans to ask Congress in early March, as part of his fiscal 2015 budget, to reduce some of the tax advantages for employer-sponsored retirement plans for higher-income earners, according to published reports. Plus, the president wants to limit the value of all tax deductions, defined contribution exclusions and IRA deductions to 28% of income — and include an overall cap on all retirement accounts, including pensions, that could bring in $1 billion a year in new tax revenue, according to a Pensions & Investments report. According to the report, the proposals are designed to direct more of...

(Reuters) - The savings of the European Union's 500 million citizens could be used to fund long-term investments to boost the economy and help plug the gap left by banks since the financial crisis, an EU document says. The EU is looking for ways to wean the 28-country bloc from its heavy reliance on bank financing and find other means of funding small companies, infrastructure projects and other investment. "The economic and financial crisis has impaired the ability of the financial sector to channel funds to the real economy, in particular long-term investment," said the document, seen by Reuters. The...

When President Barack Obama introduced a new retirement savings plan during his State of the Union speech last month, the Republican response was uncharacteristically muted. Although Republicans were upset about the president’s new reliance on executive authority to push his agenda, they had few harsh words about the details of the retirement idea. Dubbed MyRA, Obama’s initiative is intended to allow workers who do not have access to other workplace savings plans to open an account overseen by the government that would invest in low-risk Treasury bonds. It’s a relatively modest proposal, one that would be entirely voluntary for employers...

Prepare For When The New MyRA Becomes "TheirRA" Personal_Finance / Pensions & Retirement Feb 10, 2014 - 06:47 PM GMTPeter KrauthBy: Money_Morning Personal Finance Peter Krauth writes: In his recent State of the Union Address, President Obama unveiled something new: a retirement savings account to "help" Americans build a nest egg, coining it the "MyRA." Something immediately felt wrong about the proposal... but I couldn't put my finger on it. So I researched the new MyRA and found details to help you understand just how it works. But I also saw some potential dangers there that you need to prepare...

**SNIP** The biggest change will be a new emphasis on retirement readiness, rather than simply getting workers to join a plan and contribute. The idea is to focus on actual retirement outcomes, and it reflects apprehension about the large number of Americans who are approaching retirement unprepared. If that's something you're worried about, it turns out your boss shares your concern. The 2013 Retirement Confidence Survey by the Employee Benefits Research Institute (EBRI) found that just 13 percent of workers are very confident they will have enough money to live comfortably in retirement. And a 401k benchmarking survey released last...

Hold on to your wallets, folks. Without a powerful intervention, California may soon become the first big domino to fall in America's public pension debacle. To help prevent catastrophe, the California Public Policy Center (CPPC) has just made public a new database detailing the size and scope of the state's outsized expenditures on public employees — the largest ever compiled in California. Legislators and voters should take note, because California can't afford another round of fact-free partisan warfare. As recently reported in the New York Times, the fate of California cities such as Desert Hot Springs — where civic bankruptcy...

The president of a South Dakota-based financial services company says he was startled to hear President Obama call his new government-sponsored retirement program "MyRA" in Tuesday’s State of the Union address because that’s the same name as his firm’s four-year-old “keynote” investment product.

Much of the Western world will require defaults, a savings tax and higher inflation to clear the way for recovery as debt levels reach a 200-year high, according to a new report by the International Monetary Fund. The IMF working paper said debt burdens in developed nations have become extreme by any historical measure and will require a wave of haircuts, either negotiated 1930s-style write-offs or the standard mix of measures used by the IMF in its “toolkit” for emerging market blow-ups. “The size of the problem suggests that restructurings will be needed, for example, in the periphery of Europe,...

The Affordable Care Act has dramatically increased the cost of buying a health insurance plan on the individual market in California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois, Georgia, and North Carolina, states that account for more than half of America’s uninsured adults, according to a study by Sector & Sovereign, a sell-side firm that focuses on advising investors what sectors to put their money in. Worse, the firm argued in a note earlier this week, the increases in cost are most substantial for the young. According to S&S, the average deductible – the amount of money you spend out of pocket...

Dec 11 (Reuters) - Canada's postal service will phase out urban home delivery within five years and hike the cost of postage stamps to try to stem soaring losses, the post office said on Wednesday. Canada Post, like the U.S. Postal Service, is suffering as customers switch to digital communications. In August it said it was on track to run short of cash by the middle of 2014 unless major changes were made. The government-owned corporation - which has a mandate to be self-financing - last month reported a third-quarter loss of C$109 million ($103 million) before tax and said...

Fewer than half of blacks and Latino workers have retirement plans on the job, leaving the vast majority of them with no savings designated for their golden years, according to a report to be released Tuesday. Americans of all races face the growing prospect of downward mobility in retirement, the report said, but the problem is particularly acute for blacks and Hispanics. More often than not, blacks and Latinos benefit little from the tax breaks and other policy initiatives aimed at bolstering retirement security because they typically have no money to save for retirement in IRAs and other vehicles outside...

Daylight saving time ends Nov. 3, setting off an annual ritual where Americans (who don’t live in Arizona or Hawaii) and residents of 78 other countries including Canada (but not Saskatchewan), most of Europe, Australia and New Zealand turn their clocks back one hour. It’s a controversial practice that became popular in the 1970s with the intent of conserving energy. The fall time change feels particularly hard because we lose another hour of evening daylight, just as the days grow shorter. It also creates confusion because countries that observe daylight saving change their clocks on different days. It would seem...

(Reuters) - If technical problems with the U.S. government's new healthcare website are not fixed in November, hundreds of thousands of Americans could lose easy access to lower-cost coverage, jeopardizing the Obama administration's goal of making affordable insurance broadly available in 2014. Consumers in 36 states are relying on Healthcare.gov to qualify for tax subsidies that will reduce coverage costs under the 2010 Affordable Care Act, which was expected to cover 7 million people next year alone through new private insurance marketplaces. But if glitches in the marketplaces that operate chiefly online fail to be resolved, the government might have...

Seniors who went back to work after retirement used to do it to keep busy, but the Obama Recession and the uncertainties of the Affordable Care Act have made it an economic necessity for more and more older Americans, according to Dan Weber, president of the Association of Mature American Citizens. “Two recent Gallup surveys show that there are more post-retirement job seekers out there than ever before, mainly because they’ve lost confidence in the economy. The historically destructive recession that started as the president took office and his inability to speed up the recovery have seniors scrambling for ways...

However, in a recent speech in Maryland, Obama challenged Americans to go to “the website” to see how much money they could save under Obamacare. He said that once you do and find out how much you save, you’re going to sign up “even if you didn’t vote for me.” The website in question is www.healthcare.gov, and I did go to see how much money I could “save” under Obamacare.

Tom Palome, 77, was once a top marketing executive earning six figures and traveling first class He worked hard to pay off his mortgage and put his kids through college, but like most Americans didn’t save enough Now retired, he works two $10 an hour jobs to supplement his income Palome receives $1,200 from Social Security and a $600 a month pension from his last corporate job. Still, his $1,400 in monthly wages allows him to bolster his savings and provides for some extras. He goes to the theater, pays for plane tickets to visit his children and grandsons and...

Big Momma Barnhardt has an example of a form letter to send to your HR monkey to request that you can move your money to a company you trust. Trust being a relative term. Who should care? Anyone with a retirement fund but especially folks with all their eggs in one basket. People who have worked at the same company for a while are likely to have all their eggs in one basket. Enron you say?