Retirement should be a time of great fulfillment; an opportunity to live the most gratifying life possible, enjoying all that you worked so hard to achieve. For many retirees, charitable giving offers an especially meaningful way to utilize your assets and support organizations and causes you care about.
Money can be a complicated topic for many women, and too many avoid learning enough about their finances to feel secure and informed. If you count yourself in this category, it’s important to begin thinking about your retirement plan since women are much more likely than men to run out of money in their retirement years.
Only 1 in 5 Americans over 55 have a will/trust, healthcare directive, and durable power of attorney.[i] If the reason you haven’t done it is the difficulty of divvying up the assets, then the obvious answer would be to just divide everything up equally and call it a day--plenty of people do that. But there are other ways to divide an estate that may not be identical but may be of equal value. In this article, we will look at different ways to divide your assets in an equitable way to your next generation. Hopefully, this will help make writing your will easier and leave you with the peace of mind that you have created something fair for all of your children.
By Kathy Longo, CFP®, CAP®, CDFA
I was recently listening to a Ted Talk given by Carol Fishman Cohen, founder of iRelaunch, an organization that helps people successfully transition back into the workforce after career breaks. It motivated me to write an article on the topic since several of my clients, colleagues and friends have had their own experiences with returning to the workforce after long periods of being out.
The big news on August 15th announced an impending recession due to an inverted yield curve. Some clients may have been surprised to see that as a major headline since there have been other headlines over the past few months saying the exact same thing, just without an 800-point drop in the market. The goal of this update is to explain what an inverted yield curve is and what it means for your investments.
What is an Inverted Yield Curve?
It’s important to start by differentiating the stock and bond markets from the economy. The markets react to what is happening in the economy and then try to predict what will happen next. In this case, the bond market has been reacting to slower global growth by paying less interest for long-term bonds. Usually, an investor expects to get paid more (higher yield) for buying a long-term bond because there is more risk and uncertainty than with a short-term bond. The headlines on August 15th reflect that 10-year Treasury bonds are paying less interest than 2-year bonds (which, for perspective, was accurate by 0.022% and lasted for less than a day). However, the yield curve isn’t 100% accurate in predicting a recession, nor can it predict when the recession will start or how long it will last. The yield curve inverted in late 1966 right before an extended period of economic growth and there was also a brief inversion in 1998 when the yield curve was very flat, similar to our current environment, which also didn’t accurately predict a recession.
