Stay informed on the top financial topics and the key fundamentals of retirement planning and wealth management.
Long-term care often happens at home, with family doing much of the work. In High Point, Matt Landon, CFP®, talked with a Trellis Supportive Care nurse educator and a certified personal trainer about staying active at any age, what Medicare does and does not cover, and why families should talk about caregiving early.
Oil swung on Middle East headlines, Treasury yields climbed to levels last seen in 2002, and the Fed raised rates for the first time since 2023. Still, the S&P 500 finished the third quarter near record highs. Here are the ten themes behind that and what they mean for families planning for retirement.
Taxes drop after retirement, the will controls the IRA, Medicare handles long-term care, and the professionals already have it covered. These assumptions are common in households that feel well prepared, and each is only partly true. Here is what tends to sit underneath five of them, and which year-end decisions cannot wait past December 31.
A higher Medicare premium is often priced off a paycheck that no longer exists. Medicare uses the tax return from two years back, so people who retired recently can pay a surcharge set by their working income. Form SSA-44 lets them ask Social Security to look again. What the form cannot touch is income someone chose, like a Roth conversion, and that is worth pricing before the decision.
Most charitable giving happens in the last three weeks of December, paid from cash and decided in a hurry. For households near retirement, the amount is rarely the hard part. Which dollars fund the gift is. Appreciated stock, a donor-advised fund, and a distribution straight from an IRA can send the same money to the same charity with very different results for the family.
A widow asked why her tax bill went up the year her income went down. Nothing was wrong with the return. The survivor keeps the larger Social Security check, the smaller one ends, and the return changes from joint to single. Brackets narrow, the standard deduction halves, and Medicare thresholds drop. Almost all of the useful planning has to happen while both spouses are alive.
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