With the New Year already more than a month in, millions of Americans will be working on filing their taxes before the April 15th 2013 deadline.  So what do individuals do with their tax return they get back from the IRS?  The answer is most people don’t know what to do with it, and because [...]

Increasing your retirement paycheck means a job. Part time or other.  A common question around this is how are my benefits affected?   A paycheck from work can mean a portion of your Social Security benefits get taxed. If your financial situation is just right—or, more accurately, just wrong—the fact that some of your Social Security [...]

For those of you not familiar with ERISA, it stands for Employee Retirement Income Security Act, which is a federal law that sets the standards and rules for pension plans.  The same pension plans and defined contribution plans that have recently seen a large in-flow of individual annuity contracts.  Although we haven’t seen any official [...]

For years, the so-called 4% rule has provided the foundation from which advisors created income strategies from retirement accounts to create income during one’s retirement years.  The rule is simple, tried, trusted, and unlikely to fail – or at least it used to be.  In today’s low interest rate environment, the strategy that has worked [...]