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WHEN POLITICAL parties set aside partisan bickering and agree on an issue, it’s worth taking note. Such was the case last week when the House of Representatives voted 417–3 in favor of a bill known as the SECURE Act. This legislation would represent the most significant set of changes to retirement rules in more than a decade.
Why the sudden bipartisan cooperation? For better or worse, both parties recognize that a growing number of Americans face a retirement crisis.
FOLKS USED TO SAY, “You can’t go wrong with real estate.” They sure don’t say that anymore. It’s been a rollercoaster dozen years for home prices—and some experts think another rough patch is in the offing.
Since mid-2006, the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price Index first tumbled 27.4% and then bounced back 53.6%, for a cumulative 12-plus year gain of 11.5%, equal to 0.9% a year. Could we be facing another dip?
JORDAN PETERSON, a Canadian clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Toronto, has thundered onto the cultural scene, thanks in large part to his book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. I began reading with healthy skepticism, but quickly became a fan.
Not that the doctor and I agree on all points. But the book immediately confronted my intellectual laziness in a careful but unavoidable way.
LOOKING TO IMPROVE your money management? Here are 31 rules for the financial road ahead:
1. Check your retirement progress by taking your nest egg and applying a 4% annual portfolio withdrawal rate, equal to $4,000 a year for every $100,000 saved. Will you have enough retirement income—or should you be saving more?
2. Don’t automatically claim Social Security at age 62. It often makes sense to delay benefits so you get a larger monthly check,
IF YOU OWN A STOCK in a taxable account that falls in value, you can take some of the sting out of that loss by selling your shares, realizing a capital loss and then using that loss to reduce your annual tax bill. A good idea? Problem is, selling means giving up any chance of making back the loss.
Many folks aren’t keen to do that, so they often look to buy back the shares.
IF YOU MAKE REGULAR annual contributions to a Roth IRA, you can withdraw those contributions at any time with no taxes or penalties owed. It’s a different story, however, with the account’s investment gains.
Those gains will be subject to both income taxes and tax penalties if you withdraw them within the first five years and if you are under age 59½ (or, to put it another way, you need to wait five years and until after age 59½ for the account’s growth to be totally tax-free).
BY THE LATE 1990s, with almost two decades of robust investment returns under their belts, investors would talk about 6%, 8% and even 10% as a reasonable rate at which to draw down a retirement portfolio. But researchers begged to disagree—and the financial markets provided brutal confirmation, hitting stock investors with back-to-back bear markets in 2000–02 and 2007–09.
Today, 4% is considered a safe withdrawal rate (though even that number has been called into question).
ONE RULE OF THUMB suggests that, to retire in comfort, you need 80% of your preretirement income. Why the 20% drop? You are no longer saving 10% or so every year toward retirement and you’re no longer making an employee’s 7.65% payroll-tax contribution to Social Security and Medicare. In addition, you won’t have to buy work clothes or pay commuting costs. Your income tax bill should also go down, in part because a portion of your retirement income will likely come from Social Security benefits,
HOW LONG WILL IT take to double your money, given a particular rate of return? You can get a rough answer by dividing 72 by the annual return. For instance, if you expect to earn 7% a year, it would take just over 10 years to double your money. But at a 3% annual return, the compounding process is much slower, with your money doubling every 24 years.
Obviously, the higher the return you earn,
31 Rules of the Road
Below is a modestly revised version of the Jonathan Clements Money Guide 2015‘s final chapter.
Looking to improve your money management? Here are 31 rules for the financial road ahead:
1. Check your retirement progress by taking your nest egg and applying a 4 percent annual portfolio withdrawal rate, equal to $4,000 a year for every $100,000 saved. Will you have enough retirement income—or should you be saving more?
MOST OF US STRUGGLE with self-control. We eat too much, exercise too little and spend excessively. One solution: Adopt rigid rules of behavior.
For instance, I make it a rule to exercise every morning for at least 40 minutes, always buy whole wheat bread, avoid caffeine after 9 a.m. and eat fruit as a midmorning snack. I’ve followed these rules for so long that they’re no longer rules, but rather ingrained, unquestioned habits.
Not surprisingly,
On Sept. 30, 2026, the Securities and Exchange Commission proposed two rule changes which would allow performance based compensation as an option on certain registered management investment companies. Here is a link to a fact sheet of the SEC announcement about the proposed changes.
The rule changes seems to allow hedge fund like fee compensation to be paid from certain mutual funds and ETFs. I think such performance based compensation is opposite the reasons such funds came into existence.
Earlier today Dick Quinn published a useful reminder that the time to think about doing qualified charitable deductions (QCD) is now. We’ve also been looking at our annual charitable contributions. We are not quite old enough to use QCDs, but there are a few changes in the 2026 tax code that will impact our charitable donations.
Starting in the 2026 tax year, non-itemizers (those who take the standard deduction) will be able to deduct some of their charitable donations made to eligible charitable organizations.
WHAT’S THE MOST important idea in personal finance? It’s hard to single out just one, but over the years, I’ve found the following dozen ideas to be among the most useful.
Whether it’s on TV or online, there’s never any shortage of market prognosticators. Especially during a bull market, everyone seems to have an opinion on where things are headed. The reality, though, is that people can only guess about how the economy, the market or any individual investment will perform.
FOR MUCH OF THE seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European monarchs used a financial instrument known as a tontine to help finance their governments.
Tontines were first developed in the 1650s by an Italian government worker named Lorenzo Tonti and were similar to annuities: In exchange for a single, lump-sum purchase, tontines offered guaranteed payments for life. But tontines also offered some unique features.
Unlike an annuity, where payments end with the death of the owner,
