A short piece on how dysfunctional our focus on “retirement” can be.  While a new word would be great, in the mean time I’m recommending that we redefine retirement to be “the point in time where earned income is not the driving factor for personal decision making.”
Dick Wagner made a related plea last August.

And Marc [...]

Single-Family Mortgage Loan Limits effective January 1, 2007:
First mortgages

One-family loans: $417,000
Two-family loans: $533,850
Three-family loans: $645,300
Four-family loans: $801,950

Note: One- to four- family mortgages in Alaska, Hawaii, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands are 50 percent higher than the limits for the rest of the country.
Second mortgages

$208,500
In Alaska, Hawaii, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands: $312,750

Forbes has a great article describing the potential complexities caused by trying to fairly divide  non-vested stock options in a divorce.  If you are in this situation, seek help from a specialist.

If you have the ability to take pictures and email them with your mobile phone this free service from scanR can turn your phone into a poor man’s scanner.  Having used it a few times, the OCR (optical character recognition) wont work very well unless you have a 2 megapixel camera in your phone (still [...]

To get a quick estimate on how much money or income a reverse mortgage might be able to make available, here are some resources.
http://nrmla.edthosting.com/
And here is more information and AARPs own reverse mortgage calculator.
Have a great Thanksgiving!

Economist Kotlikoff (progenitor of planning software ESPlanner) advocates that living standard risk must be taken into account when determining appropriate portfolio risk (which I happen to agree with .
Those whose Social Security and other pensions provide the majority of their living expenses, can afford to take more risk in their investment portfolio. While [...]

Beginning Nov.15, it’s time once again for Medicare beneficiaries to decide if a Medicare Part D plan is right for them, and if so, which plan they will choose. The 2007 enrollment period, which runs through Dec. 31, also allows those who already have a Medicare Part D plan to choose a different plan if [...]

Evidence continues to pour in on the importance of moderate exercise as we age.
From the Wall Street Journal article:
For the first time, scientists have found something that not only halts the brain shrinkage that starts in a person’s 40s, especially in regions responsible for memory and higher cognition, but actually reverses it: aerobic exercise. As [...]

The peak oil folks have gotten fairly shrill the last year or two. And the oil industry has started their own campaign to counter some of the assertions being made. For those of you who don’t follow this debate, peak oil refers to the the point in time when the world production of oil (i.e., [...]

The value of each personal and dependency exemption, available to most taxpayers, will be $3,400, up $100 from 2006.
The new standard deduction will be $10,700 for married couples filing a joint return (up $400), $5,350 for singles and married individuals filing separately (up $200) and $7,850 for heads of household (up $300). Nearly two out [...]