Free Republic

The Obama administration is proposing tougher restrictions on brokers who manage Americans’ retirement accounts, reigniting a confrontation with the financial services industry over rules affecting trillions of dollars in 401K and other savings accounts. The change would put brokers—who sell stocks, bonds, annuities and other investments—under the stricter requirements for registered financial advisers when they handle clients’ retirement accounts. In a long-anticipated move, the Labor Department is making the proposal Monday to the White House Budget Office. After an internal review, it likely will be put out for public comment for several months. Obama was scheduled to address the AARP...

We've heard a lot about how far behind Americans are in saving for retirement, but we don't often hear many solutions that the average family can actually afford. That's how we landed on a $300 a month figure. It's a challenging number, since few of us can find an extra $300 a month without some effort and sacrifice. But itÂ’s doable, and it's enough to make a real difference in your nest egg by retirement. 1. Deal With Realities, and Control Your EmotionsA lot of folks are debating whether or not they'll ever be able to squeeze anything out of...

Looking for a place with moderate climate,stable government,low crime rate, predominantly English speaking and is not anti-gun .Where someone on a fixed lower income can afford to not have to live like a rat.

Last month, I posted “the cartoon argument” for Social Security reform. My main goal, as an American, is to achieve this important reform in the United States. And I’ve tried to bolster the argument by citing lots of hard data, including the fact that “funded” accounts already exist in nations such as Australia, Chile, Sweden, and the Netherlands. In this spirit, I wrote an article for the most recent issue of Cayman Financial Review, and I looked at the issue from a global perspective. I first explained thatdemographics are destiny.

President Barack Obama's fiscal year 2016 budget was unveiled Monday to the American public, along with the Department of Treasury's Greenbook, which provides further explanation and details of the proposals in the president's budget. In truth, the president's budget is really more of a wish list than anything else, but it's a good indication of where the administration is headed. This year's version of the budget includes a number of provisions targeting retirement accounts. That's no surprise, as provisions aimed at retirement accounts have been a regular feature in budgets in recent years. What is a surprise, however, is how...

Obama wants to cap your retirement. Inside his new budget he is proposing to cap qualified retirement savings at $3 million. That's how much the White House figures it would take to generate $200,000 worth of income annually. However the problem with such an approach as investment news points out as that and in the historic low interest-rate environment it takes more money to produce $200,000 worth of income which is all you apparently need in retirement according to them—of course they’ll never live on such a pittance. It is unclear if the administration wishes to tie the size of...

Alex Jones, the internationally known trailblazer of new media and icon of the burgeoning liberty movement, makes an unprecedented announcement in this exclusive video. He finally admits that he was the iconic comedian Bill Hicks, but reveals that this was only a character, along with the persona of Alex Jones, created by his true self David Mentalson III. The master orator and genius actor David Mentalson III is the real identity of the characters Alex Jones and Bill Hicks, and is stepping into the light to claim his position as the greatest actor in the world.

LetÂ’s take a brief walk into financial reality for a moment.At the time of this writing, the United States governmentÂ’s official debt is nearly $18.1 trillion.Now, letÂ’s look at who the biggest owners of that debt are:1) Taxpayers of the United States.If youÂ’ve held a job in the Land of the Free, 15.3% of your salary has gone to fund Social Security and Medicare.Each of these programs holds massive trust funds that are supposed to pay out beneficiaries, both present and future.Conveniently, the trust funds are required by law to buy US government debt.And given that every single US taxpayer...

Teacher pensions are a huge and growing crisis waiting to explode without major reforms, warns a new report released Tuesday by an educational think tank.“Do the math on teacher pensions and it just doesn’t add up,” argues the National Council on Teacher Quality in its report, Doing the Math on Teacher Pensions. Total unfunded teacher pension liabilities in 2014 were a whopping $499 billion dollars, the group found. That amount is surging rapidly; in 2012, the total was just $394 billion, meaning that pension debt is growing by over $50 billion a year.Some states are in a particularly huge hole....

Congressional Democrats are pushing a new bill to make it easier for workers to sock money away in retirement accounts. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.) said Thursday that they were introducing legislation that would set up automatic payroll deductions for contributions to Individual Retirement Accounts.

CARSON CITY — A retirement system official said Thursday a report showing that some public employees who retire collect more in pension benefits than they did while working was based on less than 2 percent of beneficiaries. The analysis also does not reflect changes to the retirement plan made in 1985 that reduced pension payouts, said Tina Leiss, executive officer of the system. The conclusions in the report issued by the Nevada Policy Research Institute, a conservative think tank based in Las Vegas, do not account for the vast majority of the members and retirees of the Public Employees’ Retirement...

CARSON CITY — Most people who make the decision to retire have to figure out how to live on fewer dollars, but that is not always the case with Nevada state and local government employees, a new analysis has found. The analysis by the conservative think tank Nevada Policy Research Institute, using newly available public data provided by the Public Employees Retirement System, shows that many public sector retirees actually receive a raise upon retirement. The analysis, which looked at 10 of Nevada’s largest government agencies, including the state of Nevada, Las Vegas, Clark County and the Clark County School...

It’s 2018, and Barack Obama leans toward the computer in his Chicago townhouse and punches in the title of his memoir. He enjoys the silence and the solitude. It’s been over a decade since he had time to write. This is Obama’s third memoir and probably not the last. Aged only 57, his story is still in mid-stream. What next? Go back to teaching law? Charitable work? Whichever avenue he pursues, Obama can take encouragement from sky-high approval ratings. As soon as he departed the White House, Obama’s polling numbers started to pick up. Now, he’s one of the most...

Fed related publication warns of: http://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economic-letter/2014/december/baby-boomers-retirement-stocks-aging/

Illinois is taking a novel approach to getting its residents to save for retirement. Starting in 2017, most state residents who don’t already have a retirement plan at work will be automatically enrolled in individual retirement accounts, funded through a 3 percent deduction from their paychecks. The program will be created under a law signed by Gov. Pat Quinn on Sunday. Participation will be voluntary, but workers who don’t want to save will need to opt out manually. (They will also be allowed to save more than 3 percent if they wish.) An estimate produced by the plan’s backers found...

Sen. Jay Rockefeller and West Virginia were an odd mix at first—a Harvard-educated native New Yorker from one of the nation’s richest families arriving in one of the poorest states. Through a half century of public service, he made it work. And as he heads into retirement as the last member of the Rockefeller family dynasty in political office—and the only Democrat—the five-term U.S. senator leaves a blueprint for fighting to fix real-life problems for burdened families and to protect the nation’s coal miners. […] Rockefeller was the state’s junior senator for 25 years, yet carved his own path of...

In 1977, William McPherson earned the top honor in the writing world when he was honored with a Pulitzer Prize.But nearly four decades later, the former Washington Post critic now hovers on the brink of poverty thanks to a failing pension and a bit of bad luck on the stock market.In a heartbreaking essay for The Hedgehog Review, McPherson describes what it's like to become poor in old age-as part of a overlooked group who are neither middle or lower class.Former teachers and even lawyers who can't pay their bills but aren't on the streets begging for change.Surprisingly, he says...

EXCERPT—--the WH wants you to consider a retirement plan that will invest in nothing but US government debt. Any financial professional who advised this—would be sued for malpractice. But asset allocation is merely one of the problems with the new “myRA” fund rolling out this month. A form of Roth IRA that allows people to save after-tax dollars and watch them grow tax-free until retirement, the new myRA offers a single investment option. It’s a private version of the G Fund that is available to federal workers and has lately been delivering annual returns of about 2% on its portfolio...

Here in Oklahoma, the news that Senator Tom Coburn will be retiring early from his second term has still not entirely settled in with most folks. For ten years we awoke each day knowing that our state’s voice in Washington would be one of principled reason and absolute integrity. It’s not that our other senator, Jim Inhofe, or our House members, like Tom Cole and Frank Lucas, are lacking. They are all solid conservatives, as is former congressman James Lankford, whom we elected in November to replace Coburn in the Senate. But as conservatives across the nation have recognized for...

hould anyone have been surprised that Michele Bachmann would go out with a bang, a big bang? On Tuesday, in what the retiring congresswoman from Minnesota figured would be her last White House holiday party, Bachmann used the grip-and-grin moment when she got her picture taken with President Obama to raise a reliably grin-killing topic. “The U.S. needs to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities today,” she informed him. His response? “A condescending smile and laugh,” she tells Politico, making a little pat-on-the-head gesture. “‘Michele, it isn’t that easy, but that’s OK,’” she remembers him telling her. To which the gentlelady...