Anyone who has reaped the benefits of an index mutual fund owes a debt of gratitude to John Bogle. Bogle, founder of the Vanguard Group, died Wednesday at age 89. Even if you’ve never heard his name, if you have a 401(k) or an IRA, you may have profited from his life’s work. His pioneering efforts to develop and popularize index funds — investment bundles that offer investors an easy way to diversify their holdings, slash costs and minimize risks — […]

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Stock charts make it easy to see how the market’s doing at any given time — green means up, red means down — and during a bear market, it’s generally red as far as the eye can see. For many people, the color red means one thing: stop. But to stop investing generally is a bad idea when the market gets scary. Worse yet? Selling stocks out of fear. It takes resolve to keep investing during a […]

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It’s fun to rubberneck at 401(k) balance averages, but they won’t tell you much about your own retirement readiness. A record number of 401(k) holders at Fidelity Investments hit millionaire status in 2018. Not one of them? You’re in very good company: A seven-figure 401(k) balance is the exception, not the rule. In fact, the average 401(k) balance at Fidelity — which holds 16.2 million 401(k) accounts and is consistently ranked as the largest defined contribution record-keeper […]

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Precision isn’t always possible when it comes to retirement planning. That doesn’t mean you have to wing it and hope your savings don’t expire before you do. Looking at the income, living expenses and life spans of today’s retirees can help you make the right financial moves so your golden years aren’t tarnished by an unexpected shortfall. What’s an ‘average’ retirement cost? Government and Gallup data reveal a lot about what retirement is like for Americans today. […]

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Automation is the cure for a number of life’s roadblocks — forgetfulness, procrastination, a shortage of willpower, an overwhelming to-do list. One example: Instead of manually moving cash into a retirement savings account every month, you set up an automatic transfer once and let the system take over. That’s the idea behind the “auto-IRA,” a program bandied about for years on both the state and national level that aims to make it effortless for workers to save […]

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Financially and otherwise, the deck tends to be stacked against women. The wage gap, which stood at 20% in 2017, is the most blatant example of that. If current trends continue, that gap is unlikely to close in the U.S. for another 40 years, according to an analysis by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. While they wait, women might aim to close a gap over which they have more direct control: the investing gap. When compared […]

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Welcome to our investing news roundup. Here we’ll bring you investing and retirement news from the past week or so. Bookmark this page to read the latest each week. Lyft to go public this week With many highly anticipated initial public offerings slated for the year, 2019 has been dubbed “the year of the IPO” by some folks on Wall Street. Lyft is expected to debut this week, while Pinterest has ramped up plans to go public in […]

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There’s no single path to wealth. Some people go about getting rich the old-fashioned way: Work hard, join the right industry, climb the career ladder. Others win the lottery, invent the next Veg-O-Matic or turn Instagram selfies into income. And then there are those who luck in to parents (or grandparents, or great-grandparents) who already did one of the above, or the equivalent for their generation. (Even if your parents aren’t rich, you’ll get a financial boost […]

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Scam artists often target groups of people who know each other, so do your own homework. Gaylen Rust must have seemed trustworthy to the people who gave him money. Rust was a longtime businessman in Layton, Utah, where he ran a coin shop started by his father in 1966. Rust also founded a charity called Legacy Music Alliance that funded arts programs in schools. An admiring 2013 profile in The Salt Lake Tribune called Rust “the state’s […]

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Plenty has been written about American workers’ failure to plan adequately for retirement. Their employers seem to be doing an even worse job. Only 1 in 10 large employers offers a formal phased-retirement program that lets workers cut back their hours or responsibilities before they quit work entirely, according to the 2018 Longer Working Careers Survey by professional services consultant Willis Towers Watson. Fewer than 1 in 3 of the companies surveyed offered their employees the option […]

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Next month marks the 10-year anniversary of the current bull market’s beginnings. Yet many Americans remain reluctant to invest in the stock market, a scary hangover from the Great Recession. From October 2007 to March 2009, the S&P 500 plummeted nearly 57% and it took more than five years for the index to recover. But the share of Americans with money invested in the stock market still hasn’t returned to pre-recession levels, according to various studies. In […]

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There are billions of dollars sitting unclaimed in ghosted workplace retirement plans. And some of it might be yours if you’ve ever left a job and forgotten to take your vested retirement savings with you. It happens. A lot. The U.S. Government Accountability Office reports that from 2004 through 2013, more than 25 million people with money in an employer-sponsored retirement plan like a 401(k) left at least one account behind after their last day on the […]

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