Life After Work - Will I Be "OK"?

  According to a 2025 StorageCafe survey, 42% of all baby boomers are renting a storage unit.   That means there is a lot of stuff out there that the next generation won’t want.   We’re one of those 42%.   Our unit mostly stores my baseball card and sports memorabilia collection.   I’m sure my kids will love the cash they will get from my collection, but they will hate the process of going through it and trying to figure out what to keep, sell or just throw away.   Therefore, I’ve begun the process of doing this so that they don’t have to.   The reality is, of the probably 500,000 cards I have, 500 of them likely represent 98% of the total value.   It finally occurred to me, I’ll pay more for the storage unit over time than the majority of the cards will ever be worth.   Especially since the storage company seems to increase the cost of the unit by about 10% each year.   Step one for me is to reduce the number of cards to a quantity ...

For 43 years I’ve been an advocate of annuities and the annuity industry.    I own four different annuities – a variable annuity, two fixed indexed annuities (FIAs and a Registered Indexed Linked Annuity (RILA).   Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal article on FIAs put me in a sour mood ( The Sleepy Insurance Product That Came to Power Private Credit’s Ascent - WSJ ).   I can’t believe I’m still reading negative articles like this about annuities.   Clearly, I’ve just been spitting in the wind for the last 4 decades.   While the article is far from balanced, it’s also not inaccurate.   There are a lot of consumer-friendly indexed annuities in the marketplace that I would heartily recommend to clients.   Unfortunately, right beside these quality contracts are far too many high-commission and high-fee contracts that are often overly complex.   And sadly, in many cases, the same insurance company offers both the quality contracts as well as the on...

  If you could know the date of your death, would you want to?   On our drive back to St. Petersburg from our summer stay at our place at the Lake of the Ozarks, my wife and I listened to “My Husband’s Wife”, by Alice Feeney – a book I highly recommend.   One of the many plot twists is around whether or not the company owned by one of the central characters can actually predict that date of a person’s death as it claims it can.   Not surprisingly, that got me wondering if I would want to know my death date. From a retirement planning perspective, the answer would clearly be “yes”.   As I’ve discussed in several previous blogs, one of the hardest parts of creating a retirement income plan is not knowing how many years you will live in retirement.   Will your retirement assets need to sustain you for 5 years, 15 years, 30 years or even more than that? You can easily go online and find a life expectancy calculator that will give you your life expectancy. ...

  One of the great things about retirement is that I now have time to do some things that typically wouldn’t fit into a regular work week.   On the flip side, the problem with waiting until I’m older to do some of these things is that I find I no longer have the stamina I once had.   Last week my wife and I attended the Bourbon and Beyond Music Festival in Louisville, Kentucky.   This was a four-day festival with over 30 bands each day playing on four separate stages.   When you add in the 2 travel days, this became a six-day commitment for us.   If I was still working, I might not have wanted to burn four vacation days for an event like this.   In retirement, that was not an issue.   But I didn’t expect to be so exhausted when we reached the final day of the festival.   It didn’t help that Sunday’s lineup was particularly strong, therefore it was also our longest day.   We arrived at the festival shortly after noon on Sunday so that we ...

  Dr. Joseph Coughlin, the founder and director of the MIT Age Lab, recently published an article in ReThinking65.com , entitled “The Retirement Number You Probably Haven’t Calculated For Your Client”, ( The Retirement Number You Probably Haven't Calculated for Your Client, Financial Planning Articles for Financial Advisors & Wealth Managers ).   I’m a big believer in putting in strategies to minimize the financial risks in retirement, hence why I’ve named this blog “retirement moats”.   Therefore, I read Dr. Joe’s article with great interest.   Could there be a risk I hadn’t considered in my own retirement plan?   The premise of the article is that eventually, most retirees will no longer be able to drive.   That means there is likely to be a new expense anytime they want to go somewhere.   As Dr. Joe put it, “retirement planning prices the car, it doesn’t price the driver.”.   If you don’t consider the additional expense of paying someone ...

  I recently received an email from Bank of America that encouraged me to “start my next chapter” by enrolling in their Merrill Lynch “plan for predictable income in retirement.”   As a recent retiree and retirement income geek, I was obviously intrigued.   I was curious to see the methodology BofA/ML suggested to provide me with “predictable income for my retirement.   And just how “predictable” would it be?   A few clicks later and I found myself inputting the necessary personal information that was necessary to get an illustration of their Guided Investing advisory program.   I told the online tool that I was 66, had $100,000 to invest and wanted to start receiving income in January of next year.   I was offered three risk profiles – low, moderate and high.   The low risk profile portfolio would be more heavily weighted in fixed income and provide more what they refer to as “baseline income”.   The high-risk profile portfolio would be more...