Ed. Note: taking a breather from our normal business of posting retirement, tax and other personal financial planning topics to report on the blog itself and the statistics we’ve seen in this, the 6th year of publication for the blog. We’ll be back to our regular programming with the next entry. – jb Over the [...]
Posts from ‘December, 2009’
Should You Take or Postpone Your First RMD?
In the first year that you’re required to start taking Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs) from your IRAs and other retirement plans, you have a decision to make: Should you take the RMD during the first year, or should you delay it to the following year? The Rule This decision comes about because of the special [...]
401(k) – Good For Many, But Not Necessarily the Employee
Okay, the title might be a little misleading in regards to how I really feel about 401(k) plans… I do think that these plans are (or can be) good for a lot of folks, as long as they use them correctly and follow sound investing principles. But that’s not what this post is all about. [...]
20 Questions About 529 Plans
Below is a reprint of an interaction that I had with an anonymous individual several years ago on a web bulletin board, as I thought the 20 questions that the individual listed might be interesting to you. I’ve reviewed the list and updated responses where laws have changed or where I was more snarky than [...]
The Outrageous Effect of Taxation of Social Security Benefits
As you may be well aware, Social Security retirement benefits can be taxable to you, depending upon how much other income you have. What you may not be aware of is how this can seriously increase your tax rate for small amounts of additional income. Provisional Income So – in order to calculate how much [...]
11 Ways You Can Fund Your Roth IRA
With due regards to Natalie Choate for putting together this list initially, listed below are the currently-legal methods for funding a Roth IRA account: Contributions from compensation income. These are your regular annual contributions to the Roth IRA account. You are allowed (in 2009 and 2010) to contribute up to the lesser of your actual [...]
IRA Transfer to HSA: Does This Make Sense?
In our discussion of Health Savings Accounts (you can see Part 1 here, and Part 2 here), it was mentioned that one possible method for contributing to a HSA is by way of a once-in-a-lifetime tax-free transfer from an IRA. The question is: Does this make sense? When would you want to use this one-time [...]
Health Savings Accounts – The Basics, Part 2
. In Part 1 of this two-part article, we introduced the concept of the Health Savings Account. In this portion, we’ll talk about some more of the specifics with regard to implementation of the plan, including contribution limits, setting up the plan, and taking distributions. Contribution Limits on the HSA The amount that you can [...]
Financial Recordkeeping – How Long Do I Keep This??
I often get the question – how long should I keep my _________ (fill in the blank)? So I thought I’d put together a list of the most common types of documents with some guidelines as to how long you should keep those documents. I’ll try to keep this as simple as possible – but [...]
The High Deductible Health Plan
In order to use a Health Savings Account (HSA), one of the requirements is that you have a High Deductible Health Plan (HDHP) in force. A HDHP is simply a special sort of medical insurance policy with some very particular components. Specifically, those components are: a) a higher annual deductible than most typical health plans; [...]
And if you've come here to learn about queuing waterfowl, I apologize for the confusion. You may want to discuss your question with Lester, my loyal watchduck and self-proclaimed "advisor's advisor".
