Free Republic

Hello, FReepers! Hubs is getting ready to retire from the military and we're having some trouble getting straight answers on the TriCare Prime for retirees situation. Specifically, the family coverage. (I need it) Cost is the big one. I'm seeing everything from $555 a year to more than $960 a month. It's very frustrating because we're trying to figure out our post-retirement budget.

By now, Illinois' budget problems are no secret. Back in May, after the State Supreme Court struck down a pension reform bid, Moody's move to downgrade the city of Chicago thrust the state's financial woes into the national spotlight. Since then, the situation hasn't gotten any better and despite hiring an "all star" budget guru (for $30,000 a month no less), Bruce Rauner was unable to pass a budget in a timely fashion leading directly to all types of absurdities including everything from the possibility of shortened school years to lottery winners being paid in IOUs. Now, as Bloomberg reports,...

The Insured Retirement Institute has concluded, baby boomers "face a dangerous combination of being under-saved and long-lived." The IRI found four in 10 baby boomers have nothing saved for retirement, and 37% of those who do have savings have less than $100,000 put away. This spells trouble for the average 65-year old male and female who have a 50% chance of living until at least 87 and 89, respectively. The IRI says someone who retires at the age of 65 today will need more than $1 million for retirement while someone who waits until age 70 to retire will need...

Aesop would have had a straightforward explanation for why some people just can’t manage to save up for retirement: Some people are born ants—industrious and in possession of great willpower—while others are grasshoppers, living only for today. Millennia later, sorting workers into personality-specific boxes is still the preferred way of thinking about how to get people to put more money into savings. An otherwise thoughtful survey of over 1,000 individuals and interviews with 50 people by the MetLife Mature Markets Institute identifies no fewer than 10 different variations on the grasshopper: There are “Snoozers,” “Oversleepers,” “Stewers,” “Brewers.” And then there...

Rep. John Fleming, R-La., said Wednesday morning that Tea Party favorite Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., won't run for a fourth term, and instead plans to retire at the end of the current Congress to return to his home state. "Trey wants to go back to South Carolina, and God bless him for that," Fleming said on C-SPAN. When asked if that's what Gowdy has told other Republicans, Fleming confirmed it. "At the end of his term, yes," he said. "He plans to go back home, and he wants to finish his work on the Benghazi special committee. But he loves...

While hardly as dramatic as Bill Gross' last letter in which he urged readers to "go to cash" as a result of the "Frankenstein creation" that ZIRP has created, his latest letter "Saved by Zero" takes a calmer stance and taking a page out of Paul Marshall's FT Op-Ed profiled yesterday, urges central banks to "get off zero" as the "developed world is beginning to run on empty because investments discounted at near zero over the intermediate future cannot provide cash flow or necessary capital gains to pay for past promises in an aging society. And don’t think that...

Prepare to be “nudged” by Obama's new “behavioral science” squads — for your own good, of course. Under the guise of better “serving” the American people through government, Obama signed an executive order this week calling for federal agencies and departments to deploy emerging “behavioral science” techniques against the public.Among other goals, the expansion of federal mind manipulation is supposed to help more Americans access government welfare programs, take their “recommended” vaccines, supply more information about themselves to the federal government, and accelerate the transition toward what Obama called “a low-carbon economy.” The controversial decree, signed on September 15, explicitly...

Floyd Mayweather announced his retirement from the ring, as he promised, after a one-sided victory over Andre Berto in Las Vegas, but whether it really is the last time he boxes will only be shown over time. The American retained his WBC and WBA welterweight title with a unanimous points victory that was short on highlights to claim his 49th successive victory, equalling the unbeaten record of Rocky Marciano, the former world heavyweight champion. Marciano was 32 when he was last in the ring in 1955, having boxed in only seven world title bouts, although his exciting no-nonsense style ensured

Actress Eva Longoria is offering her advice to President Barack Obama on what he should do after leaving office in January 2017. According to the New York Times, the Mexican-American actress is part of a select group of high-profile people who are advising the president during midnight meetings at the White House.

Social Security turns 80 on Friday, and the massive retirement and disability program is showing its age. Social Security's disability fund is projected to run dry next year. The retirement fund has enough money to pay full benefits until 2035. But once the fund is depleted, the shortfalls are projected to be enormous. The stakes are huge: Nearly 60 million retirees, disabled workers, spouses and children get monthly Social Security payments, and that number is projected to grow to 90 million over the next two decades. And the timing is bad: Social Security faces these problems as fewer employers are...

What do you do when you want something more and different than you’re getting in your home country? For an increasing number of 60+ women, the answer is to move overseas. According to the data we collected through our website, Best Places in the World to Retire, there can be a better life out there, if you are willing to uproot and reinvent yourself as an expat in Belize, Nicaragua or Panama. In addition to the over 5,000 answers and 200 stories on our website, in early July, we released Expats: Expectations & Reality, the first in a series of...

If you haven't taken it upon yourself to start saving for retirement, you could already be in trouble. Even worse, you could be part of a national crisis that's brewing under everyone's radars. In an earnings call Thursday, Blackstone president and COO Tony James articulated the problem and its origins. "I have the view that the hidden crisis in America that no one is talking about is what's going to happen with all of these 20, 30, 40-year-olds who no longer have corporate pension funds of defined benefit," he said. "So, they have got 401(k)s and they are making little...

We shouldn't wonder why people are working into their 70s--we should wonder why anyone retires, assuming they'll still be receiving their full pension in five years.You may have seen a variation of this chart of employment in the U.S. by age group. This chart--courtesy of mdbriefing.com-- shows the number of those employed (with any kind of job--full-time, part-time, self-employed) as a percentage of the Civilian Noninstitutional Population (CNP), which includes everyone 16 years of age and older who is not institutionalized or on active duty in the Armed Forces. A number of striking features pop out of this chart: 1....

Assuming "growth" will fund all promised pensions and entitlements is magical thinking.The core problem with pension plans is that the promises were issued without regard for the revenues needed to pay the promises. Lulled by 60 years of global growth since 1945, those in charge of entitlements and publicly funded pensions assumed that "growth"--of GDP, tax revenues, employment and everything else--would always rise faster than the costs of the promised pensions and entitlements.But due to demographics and a structurally stagnant economy, entitlements and pension costs are rising at a much faster rate than the revenues needed to pay the promised...

Brett Favre, wearing his old Green Bay Packers No. 4 jersey, is featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated this week as part of the magazine's "Where are They Now" issue. Favre voices many of the same thoughts he did back in October when Journal Sentinel reporter Tyler Dunne visited him at his home in Mississippi, talking about his life today, the physical toll the game took on him, his reconciliation with the Packers after the messy departure in 2008, and more. He also thinks he could still play in the NFL – sort of. "I think I could play,"...

Days spent in the hospital as an outpatient, rather than being officially admitted, can leave Medicare patients with bigger bills. It's bad enough spending three or more days in a hospital -- undergoing a barrage of medical tests and procedures. Brace yourself for even more pain at discharge if the hospital tells you that you were actually never admitted but were on Medicare "observation status." That designation could cost you big time. Hospitalized Medicare beneficiaries who are under observation are considered outpatients, even if they spend many days in the hospital. If you find yourself in this boat, there's a...

I’m not sure retirement is a good thing. Not the way it’s done now. The way it’s done now, it seems to me that we’re marginalizing our most skilled workers, fostering idlers and turning old age into a near useless stage of life. It used to be that people didn’t retire. They worked til they died. And if they couldn’t work, hopefully their family or their church took care of them. But everyone who was physically and mentally able to do some useful task did so. The difficulty arose when people became what used to be called senile, or when...

Only 63 percent of Americans have saved any money for retirement within the past year, according to a Federal Reserve survey released Wednesday.The survey of 5,800 Americans, conducted last fall, found that 31 percent of Americans have no retirement savings or pension plans. And among adults older than 45, almost 25 percent of respondents didn't have retirement savings. Thirty-eight percent of respondents, meanwhile, said they don't plan on retiring and will "keep working as long as possible," USA Today reports.

The United States government could start seizing 401(k) plans, says one economist who believes a recent Supreme Court ruling sets the stage for Washington to initiate any such plans. Economist Martin Armstrong published a blog post Monday that took a look at the recent Tibble v. Edison case. The court concluded that employers have an obligation to protect their workers’ 401(k) plans from mutual funds that provide deplorable returns. Armstrong thinks this could give the federal government the arsenal to begin seizing private funds and take companies to court if mutual funds perform poorly. This comes as the Obama administration...

David LettermanÂ’s departure isnÂ’t the end of an era. The era of late night talk shows ended a while back. In Johnny CarsonÂ’s final week in the nineties, he played to an audience of twenty million. Lately, Letterman has been lucky to get 2 million. His final shows have played to around 5 million viewers.Late night talk shows still exist, but their intended audience mainly watches viral clips from them the next day. The average age of LettermanÂ’s audience is 54. CBS hopes that the equally smarmy Stephen Colbert will be able to bring his younger audience demo with him,...