For many workers, the benefits package a company offers is almost as important as the salary that goes along with it. One of the benefits that workers are most interested in is the retirement plan. People want to know that they are going to be okay after they stop working, and in most cases, they are relying on their employer to help make that a reality when it comes to saving. 

Many companies offer retirement plans such as a 401(k). However, these plans can come with bureaucratic red tape and regulatory loopholes to jump through – which can make them more difficult to implement. Because of these difficulties, some companies choose to opt out of plans like 401(k)s altogether.

Most Americans are familiar with health insurance. We pay a premium to receive access to a health network. While some receive health insurance as a benefit from their employers, others must seek coverage on their own. 

The quality and type of health insurance often correlates with monthly premium. Higher quality insurance costs more than basic programs. However, other factors such as the policyholder’s individual health status affects the price of health insurance as well.

The idea of using life insurance as a retirement plan may seem, at best, counterintuitive. At worst, it sounds vaguely fraudulent if you’re not familiar with the intricacies of the life insurance industry. As far as most people are concerned, life insurance is there to support your family after you pass away, not to help you after you retire.  

What if you’re the beneficiary of someone else’s policy? Could you use the death benefit you receive for retirement then? Hypothetically, yes.

We all love our retirement accounts. Saving for the future gives us something to look forward to and reminds us how our hard work will pay off down the road. 

A 401(k) is one of the most popular and common types of retirement plans we have access to today.. By diverting money from our paycheck into our 401(k), the goal is to save enough so that by the time we retire, we can live comfortably without a change in lifestyle.

If you are considering starting or investing in a new business, you may have seen some information on a limited liability company (LLC) and a limited liability partnership (LLP). When you first look at the two business structures, they look very similar, but there are some key differences between an LLC and an LLP. 

To hopefully decrease confusion, we’ll start with defining what they are and then dive into what makes them different.

You Need a Budget, sometimes also called YNAB (pronounced why-nab), is a budgeting software. While it has been around since 2004, it first began receiving significant media exposure when it was voted the top personal finance application by Lifehacker in 2011. 

Over the past 16 years, You Need a Budget has become more than a budgeting program—for many of its hundreds of thousands of users, it has turned into a lifestyle. 

This post was last updated on January 20, 2021, to reflect all updated information and best serve your needs.

Full Disclosure: This article is not a get-rich-quick scheme of how to become a millionaire in your 50's. Rather, it's a list of sound principles and practices that you can put into place to become a millionaire at some point in your life even if not in your 50's. Becoming a millionaire and/or achieving financial independence takes discipline, hard work, and savings. I can assure you it WILL NOT happen overnight.

This post was last updated on January 20, 2021, to reflect all updated information and best serve your needs.

Full Disclosure: This article is not a get-rich-quick scheme of how to become a millionaire in your 30's. Rather, it's a list of sound principles and practices that you can put into place to become a millionaire at some point in your life even if not in your 30's (which is extremely difficult to do). Becoming a millionaire and/or achieving financial independence takes discipline, hard work, and savings. I can assure you it WILL NOT happen overnight.

This post was last updated on January 20, 2021, to reflect all updated information and best serve your needs.

Full Disclosure: This article is not a get-rich-quick scheme of how to become a millionaire in your 60's. Rather, it's a list of sound principles and practices that you can put into place to become a millionaire at some point in your life even if not in your 60's. Becoming a millionaire and/or achieving financial independence takes discipline, hard work, and savings. I can assure you it WILL NOT happen overnight.

This post was last updated on January 20, 2021, to reflect all updated information and best serve your needs.

Full Disclosure: This article is not a get-rich-quick scheme of how to become a millionaire in no time. Rather, it's a list of sound principles and practices that you can put into place to become a millionaire at some point in your life. Becoming a millionaire and/or achieving financial independence takes discipline, hard work, and savings. I can assure you it WILL NOT happen overnight.

This post was last updated on January 20, 2021, to reflect all updated information and best serve your needs.

Full Disclosure: This article is not a get-rich-quick scheme of how to become a millionaire in your 20's. Rather, it's a list of sound principles and practices that you can put into place to become a millionaire at some point in your life even if not in your 20's (which is extremely difficult). Becoming a millionaire and/or achieving financial independence takes discipline, hard work, and savings. I can assure you it WILL NOT happen overnight.

This post was last updated on January 20, 2021, to reflect all updated information and best serve your needs.

Full Disclosure: This article is not a get-rich-quick scheme of how to become a millionaire in your 40's. Rather, it's a list of sound principles and practices that you can put into place to become a millionaire at some point in your life even if not in your 40's. Becoming a millionaire and/or achieving financial independence takes discipline, hard work, and savings. I can assure you it WILL NOT happen overnight.

This post was last updated on January 20, 2021, to reflect all updated information and best serve your needs.

Also, note that this article does not provide any type of get-rich-quick strategies...because I firmly believe those do not exist. If that is what you're looking for, then this article is not for you. All of these strategies are proven to be successful, but only if you are able to put in the work required.

This post was last updated on January 15, 2021, to reflect all updated information and best serve your needs.

No matter how old you are right now, you should already be saving for retirement. Whether you're contributing to a 401(k), IRA, or other long-term investment (or all three), you have to make sure that you'll have enough money to last the rest of your life.

This post was last updated on January 15, 2021, to reflect all updated information and best serve your needs.

As family members, we have a natural inclination to volunteer when it comes to helping with managing end of life affairs and estate planning. It’s what we do. We make sure our parents, siblings, and other extended families can count on us to pitch in now and in the future. 

This post was last updated on January 15, 2021, to reflect all updated information and best serve your needs. 

For many of us, our 401(k) or similar employer-sponsored retirement plan is our primary vehicle for retirement savings. A 401(k) is a defined contribution plan meaning that our retirement benefit is determined primarily by the amount that we save and how we invest those savings. However, there is a maximum 401k contribution limit that we will cover.

This post was last updated on January 15, 2021, to reflect all updated information and best serve your needs.

A question that comes up regularly is what to do with old retirement accounts. In the old days, many workers stayed at the same employer their entire career and retired with 30 to 40 years of service.

There’s no easy way to say it: getting a divorce is terrible. Not only is there the emotional toll that you have to deal with; a divorce also brings with it a measure of financial stress as well. Instead of living on multiple incomes and sharing expenses, you are now forced to make – and pay for – everything on your own, making all financial decisions along the way. 

This burden doesn’t get any easier as you approach your retirement years either. A reduced income can make it harder for a single individual to live and thrive during what are supposed to be the golden years of life. Thankfully, there are programs out there that can provide some measure of help, and Social Security is one of them. 

For the recently widowed, there are many painful questions that have to be answered. Unfortunately, many of those questions are about money. When you should be focusing on family and saying goodbye, you instead have to deal with questions about loss of income and the decisions that need to be made. 

For widows and widowers approaching retirement, many of the money-related questions have to deal with Social Security. Because a spouse has spent his or her entire life working and paying into the system, it doesn’t seem right for it all to go to waste. Shouldn’t the widow be entitled to the Social Security benefits of the deceased?

For married couples, filing for Social Security comes with several options. Depending on the situation of the couple, there are different strategies that couples can employ to maximize their life-time benefits. We’ll cover each of these in more detail below but, for now, here is a brief overview to get you started. 

First, for couples that have a long life expectancy, the best strategy is to wait as long as possible before filing. Because waiting to file (up until age 70) increases the monthly size of your Social Security payments, a couple that expects to live a long time can earn more over the course of their retirement by waiting to file.