Money, Wealth & Power—A Daily Look at the Financial World
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink has put a number on the retirement crisis that few Americans want to hear: roughly $2 million. That figure, which Fink described as the amount workers will likely need to retire comfortably, sits far above what most U.S. households have actually saved. Federal Reserve data confirms the scale of the gap,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Your 60s are the final stretch before retirement, and how your 401(k) stacks up against others in your age group can shape decisions about when to stop working, how aggressively to save, and whether catch-up contributions are worth the squeeze. For 2026, new IRS contribution limits give workers in their early 60s an unusually large…
SECURE 2.0 gave millions of American workers two new ways to pull emergency cash from their retirement plans without the usual 10 percent early-withdrawal penalty. One option lets participants take up to $1,000 a year for urgent personal expenses. The other creates a sidecar savings account attached to a 401(k) with a $2,500 cap and…
The Internal Revenue Service announced on November 13, 2025, in Washington that the standard 401(k) contribution ceiling will rise to $24,500 for 2026, while IRA limits climb to $7,500. But the bigger story is not the higher caps. A new mandatory Roth requirement for catch-up contributions will force higher-earning workers over 50 to pay taxes…
Retiring on a single Social Security check sounds like a stretch, but a handful of Southern cities make the math surprisingly workable. The estimated average monthly retirement benefit for January 2026 sits around $1,900, and in the right ZIP code, that figure can cover rent, groceries, healthcare premiums, and still leave a small cushion. I…