Author Archives: Jay Butchko
Inflation Proofing Your Retirement Plan
You thought you were doing everything rate, saving at least five percent of your income in a savings account, maximizing your employer-matched retirement contributions, and saving up for in-state university tuition for your children. Now that you are getting closer to retirement age, inflation is the highest it has been in decades, and the… Read More »
Getting The Best Value From Annuities
If you have a retirement pension that pays you a fixed income every month for life, consider yourself lucky, but employers have been getting less generous with these kinds of benefits over the years, so most people do not have employer-provided pensions. The closest thing you can do to buying a pension is to… Read More »
3 Strategies For Simplifying Probate
Leif, the retired physician who writes the Physician on FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) blog correctly states that the only way to avoid probate is to become immortal, but unless you can succeed where Gilgamesh failed, probate is probably as inevitable as death and taxes. If you are trying to avoid probate entirely, you… Read More »
An Annual Cash Gift Will Not Make Young Adults More Spoiled Than They Already Are
The time when you used to load diapers and baby food onto the conveyor belt in the supermarket checkout line and commiserate with the cashier about how expensive children are seems like ancient history now. Your kids are now adults, and they have been consistently employed for years. You are no longer at the… Read More »
Can Smartphone Apps Make Your Plans For Aging In Place More Feasible?
There is more to planning for aging in place than adding non-stick bathmats to your bathroom and congratulating yourself on living in Florida, where the terrain is flat and most houses have one story, so you don’t have to worry about the risks of falling down the stairs or slipping and falling on your… Read More »
An Assessment Tool For Determining Whether Elderly Adults Understand Their Own Decisions
It is not difficult to find horror stories about seniors being unfairly placed under guardianship or about the most vulnerable adults, who truly are unable to make their own decisions about finances and medical care, being entrusted to unscrupulous guardians. The most nightmarish cases are about whether it is one person’s word against another’s… Read More »
What Retirees Should Know About Long-Term Care Insurance
“Don’t be insurance poor” is one of the cornerstones of personal finance at any age. Especially as you approach retirement age, you look for ways to spend a modest amount of money now in order to save a larger amount in the future. Just as young, healthy people should buy health insurance and life… Read More »
Getting Financial Compensation For Your Work As Personal Representative Of A Deceased Family Member’s Estate
If a family member has expressed a wish for you to act as the personal representative of their estate during probate, you might have found out that the surviving spouse of a deceased person has the right to claim a percentage of the estate even if the decedent’s will disinherited them, but no other… Read More »
Estate Planning For Stepparents
Florida’s roads and parking lots are full of bumper stickers celebrating how awesome it is to be a grandparent. Stepparenting has a reputation for being considerably less fun than grandparenting, but with the right stepchildren, it can be a great family relationship. In fact, your stepchildren might be the family members you trust the… Read More »
Employer-Provided Retirement Savings And Your Estate Plan
The term “the Great Resignation” has been all over the media for the past year, but it has different connotations depending on the age of the workers to which it is being applied. For younger workers, the conventional wisdom is that a “work stinks” attitude is an essential feature of the Zeitgeist, and that… Read More »
