Kiplinger’s Retirement Report

 

 

One of the resources Alan Allaire displayed at our recent meeting was Kiplinger’s Retirement Report, which is published monthly and offers advice and information for retirees or those planning for retirement. Coverage includes finances, investments, health, household management and travel, as well as taxes, Social Security and pensions.

We keep this publication on the Business table in the Reference atrium.  Back issues (everything except the most current issue) are also available outside the library via our database subscriptions and any Massachusetts library card.

From the listing of databases on our homepage, click on Academic OneFile (Home Access) and enter your library card number.  Choose Academic OneFile from the next list, click “proceed,” and then click on “Publication Search.”  Enter “Kiplinger’s Retirement Report” in the search box, click “Go,” and then click on the title to see a list of the issues available.  You can then view all the articles.

New Social Security Retirement Estimator

The Social Security Administration recently unveiled a new online calculator providing immediate and personalized benefit estimates to help people plan for their retirement. The Retirement Estimator is tied to a person’s actual Social Security earnings record and eliminates the need to manually key in years of earnings information.

The Retirement Estimator is interactive, allowing the user to compare different retirement options.  For example, a person can change retirement dates or expected future earnings.  Individuals also can print out up to three different scenarios at one time, in addition to information about their benefits at age 62 (current age if older), full retirement age and age 70.

In addition, the Retirement Estimator is secure.  The only thing it provides online is retirement benefit estimates.  It does not show the earnings record information on which the final benefit estimate was calculated, nor does it reveal other personal information.

The Social Security Department’s homepage has also recently been redesigned, making it easier to navigate.  And in the fall, they will be overhauling their retirement application, reducing the average filing time from 45 minutes to about 15 minutes.

Just as a reminder, at our September 17th meeting, Francine Kollias from the Regional Office of the Social Security Administration will speak on “The Basics of Social Security.”

BPL Workshop, July 31st

The Boston Public Library has been running a program, “Taking the Mystery Out of Retirement Planning,” and has added a special session this Thursday evening, July 31, from 6:00 – 8:00 p.m.

Christine Tang from the U. S. Department of Labor will present this workshop on how to complete the workbook, “Taking the Mystery Out of Retirement Planning.”  (This is the workbook we handed out at our last meeting at the Newton Free Library, and available online here.)

Following this presentation there will be an “Ask a Financial Advisor” session where financial advisors from our investor education series will host a 45 minute Question and Answer session. 

The meeting will be held in the Mezzanine Conference Room of the Central Library in Copley Square.  Space is limited, so for more information and to register, please call Cynthia Sullivan at 617-859-2241, or send an email to affordretirement.bpl.org.

360 Degrees of Financial Literacy

360 Degrees of Financial Literacy is a site from the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, and contains a broad set of information on all aspects of your finances.  It includes articles, tools, and FAQs for all life stages, including Career, Retirement & Estate Planning, and information for the Sandwich Generation. There’s a separate section of financial topics, specific information for women, and a financial guidance book.  And you can sign up for a weekly emailed savings tip.

The site specifies that it offers general information for managing personal finances and does not recommend specific financial actions.

How good is your investment knowledge?

Take the FINRA Investor Knowledge Quiz and find out!  It’s just 18 quick questions on stocks, bonds, risk and return, and the explanatory results may help you figure out where you need more information.

When to sell an investment?

At our July meeting, a Club member commented that many resources suggest when you should buy an investment, but they don’t often suggest you should sell.  So how do we know?

Morningstar.com offers some guidelines here, and suggests creating and using an ”Investment Policy Statement” based on your own criteria and investing philosophy.

How much to save for retirement?

The standard advice is to be able to replace in retirement 70-90% of pre-retirement income.  But recently the Boston Globe published two articles which took issue with this advice–from both ends of the spectrum–making clear how complicated the planning process can be. 

First, they reported on a study from Hewitt Associates, a human resources consulting firm, saying that we aren’t saving enough, and should aim to replace 126% of our pre-retirement income, because retirees need to allow for increased medical costs and inflation.

But in the second article, just a few days later, they interview BU professor Laurence Kotlikoff, who says we’re saving too much, at the expense of enjoying our youth, because homes are often paid for and expenses drop in retirement.

So who’s correct?  This is where using the calculators comes in handy, since we all have different circumstances. 

On the Retirement Club’s Links and Resources page we list many calculators, and several are particularly good at handling this question of how much pre-retirement income to replace.

Choose to Save Ballpark E$timate® from the Employee Benefit Research Institute’s Education and Research Fund allows you to vary your desired replacement rate (the percentage of your current income you would like to receive during retirement), so you can see how changing this percentage changes the amount you need to save.

Digital Federal Credit Union’s Am I Saving Enough? calculator doesn’t specifically talk about replacement rate, but lets you estimate future expenses to see if your savings will cover them.

The U.S. Department of Labor’s retirement calculator is the most complex, with a worksheet to enter your current and post-retirement in detail, and additional worksheets for pre and post-retirement income and assets.  These are the worksheets shown in the “Taking the Mystery out of Retirement Planning” workbook distributed at the last meeting; if you didn’t get one, the contents of the workbook are also available online.

July 16th meeting report

At our July meeting, Reference Librarian Alan Allaire expanded on his talk last month, discussing the Library’s investment resources both online and in print, and suggesting other retirement planning tools.  Among the resources Alan suggested were:

• The Retirement Road Map from Union Plus, with a brief quiz which gives you a retirement action plan.
• Bankrate.com’s Retirement page, with its asset allocation chart suggestions for various age groups.
• Morningstar’s (in library only) ability to screen mutual funds (as well as stocks and ETFs) by various criteria to narrow down your choices.
• Using Value Line’s (in library only) Education tab to “Explore the Value Line Page” and get more detail on the information provided.
• Using the database General BusinessFile ASAP  ( Home Access | In Library Access ) to research investment topics.
• Alan ended with a reminder not to forget the print materials, with specialized investment newsletters available on our business table in the Reference section, and business periodicals at the rear of the first floor (on our list of periodicals by subject, look under “Business” or “Investment).”

Please join us for our next meeting on Wednesday, August 20th at 7:00 p.m. in the Library’s auditorium, when Attorney Anthony Drenzek from the Securities Division of the Mass. Secretary of State’s office will speak on securities regulation, enforcement, and investor education and financial fraud awareness.

Books for your retirement planning

Members of the Retirement Planning Club for Women receive a monthly emailed newsletter of new books purchased with grant funds.  We hope you’ll join the Club (you can participate virtually even if you can’t come to the meetings), but if you haven’t, you can still read the Club’s BookLetters Newsletter.  (To read or sign up to receive this or any of the Library’s other BookLetters newsletters on a regular basis, click here.)

This month’s newsletter highlights new books on investing, for both the beginning and advanced investor.

“Read this book and take action”

So says columnist Scott Burns today in the Boston Globe, in a review of a new book we just purchased with our grant funds.  Read it, Burns says, and “the difference will all be in your pocket.”  The Smartest 401(k)* Book You’ll Ever Read: Maximize Your Retirement Savings…the Smart Way!: (*Smartest 403(b) and 457(b), too!) may be a long title, but it’s a short book–just 200 compact pages.  The author, Daniel R. Solin, is a  securities arbitration lawyer and Registered Investment Advisor, and the financial advice columnist for The Huffington Post. In his book, he discusses the problems with 401(k)s, how to solve them, and how to work around them with your other investments.