I’LL BE ENROLLING IN Medicare in a couple of years. I wish I knew how much my premiums will be, but that’s a mystery worthy of Sherlock Holmes. I’ve researched it thoroughly, as you shall see, and it all starts with something called IRMAA.
IRMAA is not the name of my seventh-grade crush. Instead, it stands for income-related monthly adjustment amount. It’s the premium surcharge that people with higher incomes pay for Medicare.
How much is the surcharge?

THEY SAY TIMING IS everything. That’s something I should know—because I’ve never been very good at it. The motto of Scotland’s Kerr clan is Sero Sed Serio, or Late, but in Earnest. That’s been my reputation since I was young.
In high school, my basketball game blossomed at the end of my senior year, just in time to have one good game of double-digit scoring before I graduated.

I RECENTLY WROTE about things we can do to protect our finances in the event we suffer cognitive decline. This may not be anybody’s favorite subject, but it’s an important one.
 Many of us have first-hand experience with the ravages of dementia. It can upend a carefully crafted retirement plan and necessitate costly medical care. Like many of my friends and colleagues, I’d like to know if there are things I can do to prevent or forestall the onset of mental decline.

LIKE A SLOW-MOTION train wreck, we’ve spent recent decades inching toward a world where we have too few workers and too many retirees dependent upon their labor. Have we finally reached the tipping point?
Consider today’s confluence of economic events: a labor shortage, sharply higher inflation, massive government budget deficits, and depressed stock and bond prices. To be sure, all this can be explained by the pandemic and what followed—excessive government stimulus, supply chain issues,

WHEN I WAS IN MY 20s, I was lucky to work for a company that offered a pension plan—and that put me on the road to retirement. Today, unfortunately, company pensions are rare. How can you ensure a comfortable retirement? Try shooting for these age-related milestones:
Age 25. Start saving at least 15% of your gross income. As I mentioned in an earlier article, a Fidelity Investments study found that if you save 15% of your gross income every year from age 25 through 67,

WE HAVE ALL BEEN affected by rising interest rates in 2022, from skyrocketing mortgage rates to plunging bond prices. A less-publicized casualty: Higher interest rates are having a big effect on those approaching retirement who are eligible for a pension.
How so? Many pension plans offer a choice between a lifetime stream of monthly income and a onetime lump sum payment. Rising rates could reduce the lump sum payment that many employees would receive next year by 25% or 30%.

LIKE MANY RETIREES, I’ve thought about moving. My two children are living elsewhere, and I have no other family in the Florida city where I’ve resided for more than 17 years. For two years, I’ve researched buying a condo closer to the ocean or even moving to Mexico, where my modest fixed income would go much further. Perhaps I should return to my hometown up north—something two friends from high school have already done.

I’VE SPENT THE PAST seven or eight years lamenting our cash position, both the interest it was earning and the size of it. The former was too little, the latter too much.
Some years ago, we sold an investment property with the idea of buying another somewhere we might potentially retire. But as I noted in a recent article, we’ve never been able to settle on where that would be. We were also constantly thinking we were going to move or be moved away from the Houston area,

MY WIFE VICKY AND I have lately been discussing—yet again—when to claim our Social Security retirement benefits. We’re fortunate to have multiple sources of retirement income, including a defined benefit pension, traditional IRAs, Roth IRAs and two health savings accounts.
To date, we had assumed we’d both delay claiming Social Security until age 70, so we get the largest benefits possible. Until then, we’d planned to live on my pension, any consulting income I earn,

COPING WITH FINANCIAL complexity as we age can lead to major problems—and denial isn’t the solution. What to do? One HumbleDollar commenter, in response to a recent article, recommended a book, What to Do When I Get Stupid, by economist Lewis Mandell.
The book has two main themes. First, we should try to create a guaranteed stream of income, preferably one that’s linked to inflation, to cover our core retirement expenses.

YESTERDAY EVENING we went under contract to sell our home of the past 10 years, by far the longest I’ve ever lived in one place. In our neighborhood, the average time on the market is currently 33 days. We’d been on the market for one day and the offer was over asking. We credit this to taking good care of our home, and having a sharp listing agent and staging consultant.
This experience, and what we learned from it,

A VANGUARD FINANCIAL planner once told me his clients’ biggest problem was that they didn’t want to withdraw money from their accounts during retirement. They lived beneath their means because they just couldn’t overcome their desire to continue seeing their assets grow.
If this describes you, too, you might be pleased to learn that required minimum distributions (RMDs) would be delayed a year or more if legislation, which currently sits before Congress, can slip through the crowded legislative calendar and pass before year-end.

REMEMBER THE OLD sayings that “the cobbler’s children have no shoes” and “the carpenter’s house is falling down”? That’s how I felt last month as I frantically tried to enroll in Medicare.
My 65th birthday was in early September. Medicare has an initial enrollment period that lasts seven months. It starts three months before you turn age 65, includes your birth month, and ends three months after the month you turn 65. Suppose you were born on Sept.

FOR MORE THAN 30 years, my primary hobby has been training dogs. I’ve trained my own dogs, winning multiple performance titles along the way. I’ve also devoted years to coaching dogs, and their owners, as part of a dog sports team. I’ve spent thousands of hours—and thousands of dollars—attending dog competitions.
My husband shares my passion for dog training. He spent nearly three years training one of our German shepherds to be a member of a canine search and rescue team.

WITH THE FINANCIAL markets down sharply, this is a great time to fund a Roth IRA, with its promise of tax-free growth. But the rules can be tricky.
The basics: You place part of your after-tax earned income in a Roth, invest it and—ideally—just leave it to grow. As long as the money stays there until you reach age 59½, and you wait at least five years, you can tap the account without owing a dime in taxes.