Money, Wealth & Power—A Daily Look at the Financial World
Retiring at 62 with $2 million sounds like a financial finish line, but the numbers tell a more complicated story. A detailed case study shows a couple needing to pull roughly $380,000 from their portfolio in the five years before Social Security and Medicare begin, a burn rate that can quietly reshape the rest of…
Tax rules in 2026 will reward people who think beyond the usual scramble for receipts. With higher standard deductions, reshaped brackets, and new rules for savings and estates, the biggest wins will come from how you time income, structure assets, and use the new framework, not from chasing one more write-off. The power moves now…
Retirees rarely go broke because of one bad investment. They run out of money because a string of small, emotional decisions collides with market swings, rising health costs, and taxes at the worst possible time. A simple “bucket” structure does not magically increase returns, but it can turn a fragile pile of savings into a…
By 80, the typical middle-class retiree is living on less than they did in their late 60s, but their budget is also leaner and more focused on essentials. Spending drops as people age, yet the mix of costs shifts toward health care, housing and help with daily life, while travel and big-ticket purchases fade into…
Retirees are discovering the hard way that government benefits alone rarely cover a modern retirement. With living costs rising and health care eating a larger share of household budgets, relying on Social Security as the primary paycheck in your 70s is a recipe for stress. Building a portfolio of high-yield exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, is…
Telehealth is about to hit another cliff, and this one is measured not in policy jargon but in people. If Congress fails to act within days, 67 m Americans could see virtual visits with their doctors cut off or sharply curtailed, as temporary rules that have governed remote care since the early pandemic finally run…
A guaranteed $3,000 monthly pension is turning into one of the most powerful financial levers in retirement planning in 2026. Instead of obsessing over whether their nest egg is big enough, retirees with that level of steady income are rethinking how much risk they actually need to take and how aggressively they can invest the…
President Donald Trump is promising to make homes cheaper and easier to buy, but he is drawing a clear line at letting Americans raid their retirement savings to get there. As housing costs squeeze buyers from Miami to Milwaukee, the White House is pitching a mix of supply-side construction plans, investor crackdowns and new mortgage…
The federal government has quietly approved a new data‑sharing rule that could expose the international movements of millions of people who rely on Social Security. Instead of asking travelers to report every trip, the Social Security Administration is turning to Department of Homeland Security records to see who is leaving and reentering the country. For…
Social Security is running out of political road, and one of the country’s most prominent retirement economists is no longer pretending it can be “fixed” with painless tweaks. Instead, she is warning that the program is structurally underfunded and that workers who rely on it as their primary lifeline are courting disaster. Her answer is…