Series I Savings Bonds rates increased this month. The unadjusted CPI-U rose from 301.836 in March 2023 to 307.789 in September 2023. As a result, the Inflation Rate on I Bonds increased to 3.97% in November 2023. At the same time, the fixed rate jumped from 0.90% to 1.30%. This represents the highest fixed rate…
There are plenty of free net worth trackers on the internet. For most of them, you enter the value of your assets and liabilities, and the calculator does the simple math to show you how much you’re worth. The best net worth calculators, however, do far more than simple math. They enable you to connect…
Congratulations on your retirement! Now, have you considered how you’ll handle your finances? The shift from a steady paycheck to drawing income from investments, social security, and perhaps other sources requires a different approach to cash management. This article was inspired by an email from a reader named Irving who asked the following question: “I’m…
Retirement calculators can help us plan and prepare to retire. When we are years away, these online tools can help us determine how much we should be saving. As we approach our time to retire, they can help us understand how much we can spend each year in retirement without going broke. Not all retirement…
In 2017, the Stanford Center on Longevity analyzed 292 retirement withdrawal strategies. The study used eight metrics to measure how each strategy would satisfy various retirement income goals. From this analysis, the study identified what it described as the Spend Safely in Retirement Strategy (SSiRS). As described in a paper titled How to “Pensionize” Any IRA…
Robo-Advisors promise to make investing easy at a very low cost. Investors have taken notice. According to one estimate, automated investing platforms will manage nearly $1.5 trillion by the end of the year. With dozens of options, however, picking the best robo-advisor can be overwhelming. To help, I examined about two dozen robos and narrowed…