Category: Retirement Planning

If You’re Self-Employed and Have Zero Employees, You Should Set Up an Individual 401k Plan Before the End of the Year

Friday, December 12, 2014 at 1pm
By John Friedman

Financial planners and tax advisors tend to shy away from simple blanket statements. They’re far more comfortable using highly-detailed, multi-faceted statements that, while accurate, nonetheless lose something in the telling due to, ironically enough, their completeness. It’s understandable. After all, the arena in which financial planning and taxation come together […]

When a Vig Equals Ownership: The Forever-Cost of a 401k Plan

Tuesday, June 3, 2014 at 2pm
By John Friedman

Wall Street — by which I mean the overall business behemoth that makes its money by holding investments of other people’s money and by trafficking in investments and money generally — is vigging all of us to death. I mean this pretty much literally, i.e., I mean that, from the […]

Job Lock: It’s Real, and Obamacare Reduces It a Lot

Wednesday, February 12, 2014 at 7am
By John Friedman

How many people do you know who truly love their work? My hunch is that your answer to that question is, at most, something in the neighborhood of “oh, maybe a few.” And of those few, how many do you think would continue in their work if they had some […]

Free Money: How the Free Money of Medicaid Expansion is Better than the Free Money of a 401k Match

Friday, November 22, 2013 at 1pm
By John Friedman

Never turn down free money, you hear people sometimes say, right? And if free money were a more common thing, why, then you’d hear it said a whole lot more, but it ain’t (because, you know, TANSTAAFL and if-it-looks-too-good-to-be-true and such) so you don’t. But free money does in fact […]

Putting Your Savings on Auto-Pilot Can Be a Great Idea (but Usually Not Via Complicated Life Insurance)

Friday, February 15, 2013 at 2pm
By John Friedman

I’ve often said that your savings rate is the primary numeric fact underlying your overall financial health. See here, here, here and here, to just link a few. In the next breath, though, I usually have to add that, quite unfortunately, many of us are quite rotten at saving money, while just […]

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