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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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