How Boomers Can Get Along with Their Investments

Posted on by

In midcareer, people need to get along at work, and in retirement people must get along with their investments. At work in middle life, and with investments in retirement, getting along includes people, but it also involves the circumstances, tasks, and procedures in each setting.

Retirees can manage their own investments as they managed their work, but to do so, they should grow familiar with their assets, understand asset allocation and rebalancing, and keep a steady discipline concerning withdrawals.

One good way to gain confidence with managing a retirement portfolio is to work through a model program year-by-year. Continue reading →

Rounding Out Your Retirement Portfolio

Posted on by

Last week we added Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) to a retirement portfolio, and this week we add international investments. The completed portfolio will now have domestic stocks, domestic bonds, REITs, and international stocks. Just these four investments can carry a retiree a long way into efficient, reasonably stable returns.

Why international investments? Diversification and growth are the best answers. Fifty years ago the United States dominated the world of investment opportunities, but today many countries have growing economies, well-run innovative companies, and good opportunities for investing. Continue reading →

Invest in REITs As Well As Stocks and Bonds

Posted on by

Good investment literature always recommends diversification. It counsels investors to forget about trying to pick the next Apple or Microsoft. That is a guessing game, and the odds are against small investors. Here at Later Living, I have followed the literature and used example portfolios consisting of broadly diversified stock and bond index funds. Today I will include real estate, or REITs, in the retirement portfolio.

REITs are real estate investment trusts, and they owe their modern form to legislation enacted in 1960 and subsequently modified. REITs provide investors easy ways to participate in investments like apartments, office buildings, shopping centers, timberland, and others types of income-producing real estate. Continue reading →

How To Save Your Family From the U.S. Decline

Posted on by

Last week the Federal Reserve published a study that made the news: between 2007 and 2010, Americans experienced a 39% decline in median net worth and an 8% decline in median income. The report is one of a series going back to at least 1989, but the new report shows an unprecedented decline in economic well-being.

Although the data are dismal, there is a lesson for Americans willing to fight: it’s time to return to the working and saving habits of American mythology where strong families work together toward common goals. Families will want to pull together into larger, more integrated economic units to help those affected recover and move forward.

Continue reading →

Can We Read Our Way to Redemption?

Posted on by

Our class

A varying bunch of us seniors have been studying literature together for two years. Our class is part of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Georgia, which offers classes, clubs and social events for mature adults.

We just read A Good Man Is Hard to Find, a short story by Flannery O’Connor, first published in 1953 when she was 28 years old, then again in a book of the same name in 1955.

The story involves a deadly confrontation in rural Georgia between a criminal, The Misfit, and a family heading to vacation in Florida. The final scene portends Christian salvation juxtaposed with violence and death, and redemption occurs in so ordinary a way as to invite us to reflect on our own prospects.

Continue reading →

It’s Your Turn—Volunteering Is Easy, Fun and Important

Posted on by

Learning some new procedures from a young staff member at Meals on Wheels

For retirees volunteering usually beats work. Volunteers are not usually competing against co-workers, are not facing pressure to make economical use of time, are not usually micro-managed or given impossible deadlines and are not ordinarily forced to accommodate oversized workplace egos. Instead, volunteers can focus on the work experience itself. Continue reading →

An Added Burden For Boomers: Your Children’s Retirements

Posted on by

The Huffington Post published the following piece on May 25. The idea—parents saving for their children’s retirements—left several readers frustrated. Yet parents have always been leaving bequests for their children; this piece recommends a specific type of bequest—a retirement account or annuity, left at death. I am reprinting it here as this week’s post.

The economy is not clicking along like it should—the recovery of the last few years is slow, halting, and uncertain. The United States now has a large cadre of long-term unemployed, and many of them are in their twenties and early thirties. Continue reading →

Loss and Resilience in Alabama: A Photo Essay on the Tornadoes of 2011

Gallery

Posted on by

This gallery contains 25 photos.

The spring of 2011 brought violent storms to middle America, and some of the fiercest moved through Alabama on April 27. An EF-4 storm cut a swath from Tuscaloosa through parts of Birmingham, killing about 60 people, and an EF-5 … Continue reading →

We Can Be Happy with Ordinary Friends

Posted on by

People often idealize friendship, talking about true friends and soul mates with whom deep and lasting relations abide and in whom true sympathy resides. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that way in 1841 in an essay on “Friendship.” He describes friendship as a high-minded, God-given relationship between persons.

Writing in January on our blog, Later Living, I took a more practical tack, speaking of friendship as human companionship offering goodwill and affection; writing that friendships make people healthier and help them live longer, and that to make friends retirees need to join activities with other people.

Is Emerson’s a more helpful view—one that leads to a healthier or more fulfilling later life? Continue reading →

Later Living in Investment News

Posted on by

Warren Flick and Later Living Appear in Investment News

Warren was recently interviewed for a short piece in Investment News about empowering individuals to manage their own investments.

Read the full article here. Free registration required, but if you don’t want to register, you can bypass registration by clicking here to Google search for “Warren Flick Investment News” and then clicking on the first result.