Wealth management

A 65-year-old couple retiring in 2012 is estimated to need $240,000 to cover medical expenses throughout retirement, according to the latest retiree health care costs estimate calculated by Fidelity Investments. This represents a 4% increase from last year, when the estimate was $230,000.

Women may have advanced academically and up the career ladder, but there is still a ways to go in terms of retirement readiness. A new study from ING Retirement Research Institute shows that on average, women have $41,000 less saved than men over the course of a lifetime. For women with children, that gap expands to $61,000.

Creating an adequate amount of income for individuals to live comfortably in retirement will require a combination of several income producing strategies, as well as knowing what constitutes realistic and "safe" withdrawal rates from retirement plans, according to a recent issue brief by the Institutional Retirement Income Council.

Aging baby boomers got some jolting news on Monday when the U.S. government said the Social Security retirement program is on track to go bankrupt three years earlier than expected if reforms are not made.

Usually, when people talk about someone "going through a stage" they are talking about a toddler or a teen. But there's another age at which people go through a key transitional period, also marked by angst and rebellion: Call it pre-retirement.

Working Americans households probably will experience a potential income drop of 28% in retirement, and 38% retiree households report not having sufficient enough income to cover monthly expenses. This is according to new research from Fidelity today that shows retirement income gaps could force significant sacrifices among workers retiring tomorrow and in 50 years.

Young people plan on working well into retirement — not necessarily due to financial need, but because they want to stay active and involved. This is according to new survey results from T. Rowe Price, showing that 69% of respondents between the ages of 21 and 50 plan to work either part-time or full-time during their retirement years. Among those who plan to work at least part-time, most (75%) will do so because they want to stay active and involved; only 23% believe they will do so because they will not have saved enough money.

Most American investors mistakenly believe that target-date funds provide guaranteed income in retirement, among other misconceptions of how the instruments work, the SEC found in a recent investor survey.

Continued economic uncertainty has led all workers to dip into their retirement savings, but minorities have been the hardest hit, according to a new study from Ariel Education Initiative (a nonprofit affiliate of Ariel Investments) and Aon Hewitt. Compared to their Asian and white counterparts, African-American and Hispanic employees are eroding their retirement savings at an alarming rate.

While it's not trending highly on Twitter, the hashtag #rothiramovement is hot in the personal finance Twitterverse right now.

In its annual retirement confidence survey released last year, the Employee Benefit Research Institute found that 20% of workers intend to retire at a later age than they had planned. Of those who said they will retire later, the main reasons cited were the poor economy, a lack of faith in Social Security or the government, a change in employment situation or, simply, that they can't afford to retire.

Seventy may be the new 60 — but not where the Internal Revenue Service is concerned. People who turned 70-1/2 last year must begin taking required annual withdrawals from their tax-deferred retirement accounts no later than Friday, a reality many older workers weren’t aware of. Employers can help fill the education gap.

EBN Associate Editor Lisa V. Gillespie sat down with Gerald Wernette, director of retirement plan services for Rehmann Financial, to discuss multiple issues facing retirement plan sponsors today, including the obligation to provide participants with financial education and how to give those education programs tailored relevance to employees across all life circumstances.

Workers aren’t saving, but those who are, are doing in an employer-sponsored 401(k) plan. In total, 60% of workers report that the total value of their household’s savings and investments, excluding the value of their primary home and any defined benefit plans, is less than $25,000. However, one area in which Americans are saving for retirement is an employer-sponsored retirement savings plan, such as a 401(k). In fact, 81% of eligible workers (38% of all workers surveyed) say they contribute to such a plan with their current employer.

Overall U.S. investor optimism has surged back up to the February 2011 level with a significant jump from September, according to a survey from Wells Fargo and Gallup. Seventy-two percent say they are either better off (40%) or no worse off (32%) than they were nearly four years ago, before the last presidential election, while 27% say they are worse off financially.

Sam Lazarus would love nothing more than to save money in his individual retirement account.

Over the past 60 years, women have entered the education system and the workforce in greater numbers than ever before, and it would seem that because of this work, they'd be on equal footing with men when it comes time to retire.

Most retirement planning exercises begin and end with a simple question: How much income will you need to replace after you quit work?

Average life expectancy has risen dramatically during the last century. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that the number of centenarians, people who live to be 100, rose from 2,300 in 1950 to nearly 80,000 in 2010, and will exceed 600,000 by 2050. And according to the Society of Actuaries, a 65-year-old couple now has a 31% chance of at least one spouse living past the age of 95

My grandmother had a coffee can for spare silver coins. My Dad saved at his local post office in a savings account. Those were a sign of the times — the U.S. postal savings system was the first government-guaranteed savings vehicle, but it disappeared in 1967.