Money, Wealth & Power—A Daily Look at the Financial World
Retirees After Age 75 often discover that their budgets are far less predictable than they expected, even if mortgages are paid off and daily spending seems stable. Hidden Expenses That Sneak Up can cluster in the late 70s and 80s, when health, housing and support needs shift quickly and permanently. Understanding these sneaky retirement expenses…
A 70-year-old sitting on a $1 million traditional IRA faces a deceptively simple question: how to draw down that balance over a retirement that could last 15 years or stretch well past 25. A sustainable approach depends on a handful of tax rules, longevity assumptions, and IRS provisions that, when combined, can help extend the…
Social Security was never designed to replace an upper-class retiree’s full income, and by age 83 the gap between what the program pays and what higher-income households may spend in retirement can be especially clear. The Social Security Administration publishes average monthly benefits broken down by single year of age for retired workers, which makes…
Baby boomers are entering retirement at the worst possible time for financial security. A collision of shrinking Social Security reserves, record housing costs, and rising homelessness among older adults threatens to push a significant share of this generation from fixed-income stability into outright destitution. The conventional wisdom that homeownership and decades of work guarantee a…
A retired worker collecting the national average Social Security benefit of roughly $2,000 a month could see that check shrink to about $1,540 if the agency flags an overpayment and withholds roughly 23 percent by default. The Social Security Administration has shifted its default recovery rate three times in barely a year, landing on a…
Social Security deposits reaching as high as $5,181 per month are arriving in bank accounts across the country this week, reflecting the full effect of the 2026 cost-of-living adjustment. That top figure applies only to a narrow slice of retirees who delayed claiming until age 70 and earned the taxable maximum every year since age…
Robert Kiyosaki, the author of “Rich Dad Poor Dad,” has repeatedly warned that baby boomers face a financial reckoning that could leave many homeless as retirement safety nets erode. His alarm may sound extreme, but federal data on both homelessness and Social Security solvency suggest the underlying pressures are real and accelerating. More than 770,000…
Social Security checks got a little bigger in January 2026, but for millions of retirees the raise is already spoken for. The 2.8% cost-of-living adjustment adds roughly $56 a month to the average retirement benefit, a gain that sounds helpful until you stack it against the bills that keep climbing faster. I want to walk…
Households headed by someone 65 or older spend an average of $4,343 a year on federal income taxes, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 2023 Consumer Expenditure Survey. That figure reflects the combined tax burden from pensions, Social Security, required minimum distributions, and investment income, and it represents real cash that could otherwise cover…
The Social Security system is not going bankrupt, but the checks retirees receive could shrink meaningfully within the next decade. The 2025 Trustees Report projects that the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund will run dry in 2033, and after that point, incoming payroll taxes would cover only a fraction of promised benefits. For tens…