AS I TYPE THIS, I’m less than a week from walking out the door of my workplace for the last time, bringing my second career to a close. I’m looking forward to the rest of my life.
We’ve been anticipating this day and we’re more than ready. My wife is already retired. My work for a large corporation is fine, but I’m not passionate about it. While there are some positive aspects to where we currently live,

PARTICIPANTS IN 401(K) plans will soon be getting estimates of how much income they might receive in retirement if their plan savings were spent purchasing an annuity. Under a new rule, plan providers are required to provide participants with at least two annuity estimates annually on their account statements. One would project the lifetime income from the purchase of a single-life annuity and the other from a joint-and-survivor annuity. A joint-and-survivor annuity extends payments over two lives,

AT THE END OF EACH month, my pension arrives in my bank account. I can count on the same amount every month. It’s comforting.

In the old days, nearly 50% of working Americans had pension benefits. But it was never more than that. For most workers, the three-legged stool really only had two legs, Social Security and personal savings. Today, 76% of state and local government workers have a pension plan, versus just 12% of private sector workers.

DON’T YOU LOVE those online calculators that, with just a touch of your screen, will tell you whether your retirement plan will be successful or not? I especially like it when I can pick the rate of return on my investments. Who knew that, if you assume an annual return of 40%, you could save less and retire sooner?

I just tried a FIRE (financial independence/retire early) calculator, designed for those who want to save aggressively and retire at a young age.

ACROSS THE COUNTRY, teachers are losing out on hundreds of thousands of dollars in retirement money because of the fees in their 403(b) plans. When I tell this to most teachers, they look at me with a level of skepticism that should be reserved for the salesperson who signed them up for a 12-year variable annuity contract.
“That can’t be true,” they say. “The district wouldn’t allow this. The union wouldn’t allow this. Everyone I know uses that company.

FINANCIAL EXPERTS often advise retirees to delay claiming Social Security. Their actuarial tables and statistics make a compelling case. Still, as soon as I’m eligible, I’ll strongly consider claiming Social Security.
Why? I never knew either of my grandfathers. My mom’s dad died of a stroke when she was age 19. One of my favorite photos of my parents’ wedding is that of my uncle—my mom’s oldest brother—walking her down the aisle. My grandfather never got to see my parents wed.

FORGET BUYING A HOME or paying for college. In terms of complexity and cost, nothing comes close to retirement—a topic that encompasses saving, investing, taxes, Social Security, health care expenses and countless other financial issues.
Fortunately, there’s a growing body of research to guide us, and some of the best studies come from Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research (CRR). Here are just some of the insights I’ve lately garnered from CRR studies:
Valuing annuities.

THE SOCIAL SECURITY Administration began rolling out a new, smaller annual statement on May 1. As reported in Think Advisor and other publications, a small percentage of online “my Social Security” account users, who aren’t currently receiving benefits, will get the new printed statement.
The new statement is two pages instead of four. One significant improvement is a graphic that shows what your estimated monthly benefit could be if you started taking benefits in any of the nine years between ages 62 and 70.

MY WIFE AND I are aiming to retire in 10 or 15 years. With the Dow Jones Industrial Average close to 35,000, I can’t help but wonder: At what level for the Dow can we retire?
Yes, I know the Dow is a terrible index. But it’s also the one that’s most commonly mentioned in the media. I’ve followed it for most of my life, so I’m much more emotionally tied to it than the S&P 500 or any other index.

LIVING IN THE PACIFIC Northwest, my favorite time of year is summer. I love the extra daylight and relief from the nagging rain. In recent years, there’s been an additional reason to look forward to summer: I get to see my paycheck again.
Some background: A few years ago, in an online investment forum, another participant—I’ll call him Dave—gave me a tip for early retirement. He suggested that I practice living off my investment portfolio even while working.

VANGUARD GROUP released its latest How America Saves report last month. The survey details the behavior of participants in Vanguard-managed 401(k) and similar retirement plans.
Wall Street likes to depict everyday investors as fools. But the Vanguard report paints a very different picture: Employees are getting smarter. They’re saving more, trading less and aren’t so inclined to take big positions in their employer’s stock.
As I flipped through the numbers and charts with a cup of coffee on a recent Saturday morning,

THIRTY YEARS AGO, I took a course on sales and entrepreneurship. We had to buy a few books, subscribe to The Economist and The New York Times, and buy an HP 12C calculator. This was not your usual sales class. I felt like I was piloting the space shuttle as I learned how to use that HP calculator.
I’ll never forget the first time the instructor had us calculate how much money we’d need when we retired.

MY WIFE AND I DO a mid-year and year-end financial review. This includes an updated family balance sheet, cashflow analysis, portfolio review and a review of retirement projections.
I’m semi-retired and do some consulting when work is available. This income isn’t guaranteed, so I keep a spreadsheet that estimates our income and tax burden for the year. I usually update this quarterly to see if we need to submit any estimated state or federal tax payments.

ON THE JOURNEY to retirement, should you focus on setting a retirement spending budget or on making sure you have adequate retirement income?

I think the answer is obvious: There’s no point deciding on a budget until you know how much money you’ll have available to spend. And yet I hear about people who devote endless hours to detailing precisely how much they’ll spend in retirement on everything from housing to travel to health care to dining out.