Insights

Chances are good we’ve all felt a bit like Rachel on “Friends” when she peruses her first paycheck in bewilderment and says, “Who’s FICA? And why’s he taking all my money?”

Ryan Yamada, CFP®, Senior Wealth Planner We’ve all heard the conventional wisdom when it comes to claiming Social Security: you should wait as long as you can before claiming benefits. Wait right up to age 70, if possible. After all, that’s when you would get the greatest monthly benefit.

Karl Strube, Senior Tax Planner The transition from employment to retirement can be complex. For decades, you received either a regular paycheck or earnings from self-employment, and now that will slow or stop. To compound that, you’ll be taking money out of all these accounts after putting …

You might have more money stashed away in the Social Security trust fund than anywhere else. In fact, what you put into Social Security very well might be your biggest asset and future source of retirement income.

We live in the Information Age, where any information we could ever want is available to us within seconds, but due to the overwhelming wealth of info and sources – not to mention neck-break speed of the instant news cycle – it feels hard to know what’s really going on.

As you move toward retirement, you can’t be content just to accumulate assets. You need to develop a retirement income plan that can help guide you when it comes time to turn savings into sustainable retirement income.

The retirement planning process is full of potholes – they seem to pop out of nowhere and can do major damage if you’re not careful. In my years as a financial guide, I’ve put in a lot of man-hours helping people avoid financial potholes. The danger is real and the monetary bruises take a w …

You’ve probably heard of the three-legged retirement savings “stool.” The idea is that a quality savings plan for retirement starts with having three aspects of saving: personal savings, employer retirement savings and government-provided benefits.