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Older workers can now put more savings than ever into their 401(K) accounts, under new rules starting in 2025. Every year, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announces the maximum amount savers can put in their workplace retirement account, which is adjusted for inflation. Americans over the age of 50 are also able to put extra cash into their retirement savings with catch-up contributions. From next year, workers specifically between the ages of 60 and 63 will have a higher catch-up contribution limit, the IRS announced Friday. The change is designed to help boost the savings pots of people in their...

Saving for retirement is a huge challenge. Knowing where you stand in comparison to peers can help to gauge whether your efforts are on track, or whether tweaking your approach is in order. Recently, Vanguard looked at 2023 account balances by age in its defined contribution plans. Vanguard then calculated both the average balance and the median balance for each age cohort. The average balance can be skewed by those with higher levels of wealth. So, in some ways, the median balance — the number midway between the high and the low — can be a more accurate measure of...

Labor economist Teresa Ghilarducci says work is the new retirement. She blames "policymakers who experimented with our retirement system 40 years ago, and they are not saying the experiment failed." That experiment is what is known today as the 401K, named after part of a 1978 law that offered companies an alternative to the traditional pension plan.

Before anybody can claim that I am circulating a conspiracy theory, or citing an unreliable “news” source, I am going to quote President Biden’s State of the Union address and his own website (whitehouse.gov) as the sources of this information. I will then encourage readers to circulate this information as widely as possible via social media, letters to the editor, and talk radio to educate the public between now and Election Day. The State of the Union address says in part, “Under my plan nobody earning less than $400,000 will pay an additional penny in federal taxes. ... It’s time...

Your 401(k) Will Be Gone Within a Decade Please consider Your 401(k) Will Be Gone Within a Decade If you are among the 56% of US workers with a retirement plan, I have some bad news for you: Your 401(k) will be gone in 10 years, tops. Not the money, thank goodness, but the plans themselves. There has been a brewing intellectual movement to get rid of the 401(k) for several years, with scholars on both the right and left questioning its value. And as the federal government gets increasingly desperate for new sources of revenue, the tax treatment of...

A majority of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck. A majority don’t have enough money to pay for a thousand-dollar emergency. Home ownership is a rapidly dissipating aspect of the American dream. Americans’ credit card debt is at a record high because of high inflation and the cost-of-living, and they’re falling behind on debt payments. People don’t have enough money for retirement. So what is the solution? Well for some economists, it’s time to take away the tax benefit for 401(k) plans because the government is short of revenue to pay for their exorbitant spending. See here, from USA Today:What if the...

IBM is set to shake up its retirement benefits in 2024 much to the alarm of at least some staff. The IT giant on Wednesday informed its US workers that starting on January 1, 2024, the corporation will no longer match employee contributions to their 401(k) retirement plans. Instead, it will offer a new benefit called a Retirement Benefit Account (RBA).

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is changing limits on Americans’ catch-up contributions to their retirement accounts that will be in effect through 2025. The IRS announced Friday that it’s putting an administrative transition period in place until 2026 to extend the new requirement that catch-up contributions made by higher-income individuals participating in a 401(k) or similar retirement plan be treated as after-tax Roth contributions. The change delays the implementation of a rule that Congress approved last year as part of the Secure 2.0 Act. Americans aged 50 and older have previously been able to make catch-up contributions to put extra...

The economic meltdown that is coming should not be a surprise to anyone. Throughout U.S. history, there have always been signs that a major downturn was coming, and that is precisely what we are witnessing right now. Tax revenues are way down, demand for trucking services is way down, demand for cardboard boxes is way down, the money supply is shrinking at the fastest pace in modern history, and the Conference Board’s index of leading economic indicators has already declined for 15 months in a row. At this point, anyone that cannot see what is coming has got to be...

More Americans are tapping their 401(k) accounts because of financial distress, according to Bank of America data released Tuesday. The number of people who made a hardship withdrawal during the second quarter surged from the first three months of the year to 15,950, an increase of 36% from the second quarter of 2022, according to Bank of America’s analysis of clients’ employee benefits programs, which are comprised of more than 4 million plan participants. It’s a “pretty troubling” development if more people are resorting to making hardship withdrawals, Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree, told CNN. “You understand why...

The SECURE 2.0 Act has provisions that will impact how high earners can save for retirement. Beginning in 2024, if you earn more than $145,000 each year and are age 50 or older, your catch-up contributions must be made as after-tax Roth contributions.

Changes to a popular 401(K) tax deduction are set to hit millions of high-earning Americans from next year. Workers over the aged of 50 are entitled to make catch-up contributions to their 401(K)s worth up to $7,500 this year. The annual cap on all contributions is $30,000. But from 2024, those earning over $145,000 will no longer be able to put these catch-up payments into a traditional 401(K). Instead, the money will be only funneled into a Roth IRA account, according to new rules passed through Congress in December. The main difference between a Roth account and a 401(K) pot...

A new report released by Vanguard shows the average account balance in retirement contribution plans dropped by 20 percent from 2021 to 2022. Vanguard’s report found that the average account balance for its defined contribution plans was $112,572 in 2022, down nearly $30,000 from the average in 2021. The report noted that 1 in 3 account holders had a balance of less than $10,000, about 25 percent had a balance of more than $100,000 and 12 percent had a balance of $250,000 or more. The report attributed the drop in average balances to “market performance and an evolving participant base.”...

resident Joe Biden is threatening the returns of 401(k) savings accounts, risking millions of workers’ comfortable retirements. If you put money into a 401(k), beware. Until now, the law always required fund managers entrusted with your savings to invest the money where it’s expected to get the top profit for you. Period. But late last month, Biden’s Labor Department announced a rule change that goes into effect at the end of January. It will allow fund managers to invest your money in the stocks of companies that favor left-wing policies, even if they earn a lower return. It’s legalized theft....

Have you taken a peek at the balance in your 401(k) retirement accounts lately? Here’s our advice: Don’t bother. It will ruin your whole day, week and month. We’ve now had seven straight months of 8%+ inflation. A year ago we were assured by the White House that these rapid price increases in everything from groceries, to rental cars, to gasoline at the pump, to health insurance were merely “transitory.” Whoops. The most immediate sticker shock from Bidenflation has been to shrink real take-home paychecks of workers. This rise in consumer prices over wages means that the average family in...

Inflation has taken an average of 25 percent - at least $2.1trillion - off the 401Ks of American workers, despite President Joe Biden's insistence Sunday that the 'economy is strong as hell.' The analysis was done by conservative economists Stephen Moore and EJ Antoni, who said that the balance of Americans' 401ks will 'ruin your whole day, week and month.' Moore and Antoni note that inflation has been going at 8 percent for the past seven months, despite the White House claiming things were temporary.

Twitchy US NEWS MEDIA ENTERTAINMENT CARTOONS Premium Content My Account × Search twitchy.com.... If the ‘My 401k’ trend is ANY indication, Democrats are in seriously DEEP crap come November (here are some of the ANGRIEST tweets) Posted at 8:44 am on September 24, 2022 by Sam Janney As the Biden admin desperately tries spinning this disastrous economy (look, you’re paying less for gas but still more than before but hey, you should be grateful), it’s becoming more and more obvious that they either have no idea what the Hell they’re doing OR there is sadly some truth to the ‘conspiracy’...

If the Dow finishes down for the week, which it is solidly on pace to do, it would be its eighth-straight weekly loss. That would be the longest weekly losing streak since 1923, according to FactSet data reviewed by LPL Financial.The long stretch of losses underscores the negative mood on Wall Street as investors grow nervous about high inflation – and what the Federal Reserve will have to do to get prices under control.

Volatile stock markets are eroding the retirement savings of America’s teachers and firefighters after public pension systems ended last year with equity holdings at a 10-year high.

Asset managers like BlackRock are pushing to create ESG 401(k) funds in part because they can charge higher fees. According to Morningstar, the asset-weighted average expense ratio of U.S. "sustainable" funds was 0.61% in 2020 compared to 0.41% for all open-ended mutual and exchange-traded funds and 0.12% for passive funds. This difference can reduce retirement savings by tens of thousands of dollars over a few decades. (snip) All of this amounts to a backdoor rewrite of Erisa, one of the better laws of the last 50 years. Progressives are moving across the Biden administration to steer private capital to implement...