Money

My daughter in law says she heard that Social security is going to cut our checks by 70% this year and that Trump is going to cancel it with in a couple of years. I want to know if this is a possibility or not. I can't live with out my check. Please let me know if this is true.Thank you Sharonsharonstartrek@aol.com

FROM THE ARTICLE. 8 Costly Tax Mistakes Retirees Make. Find out how to avoid these pitfalls. By Martha C. White, AARP. Published February 03, 2026. Retirement might free you from the grind of working daily, but when it comes to preparing your tax return, a little extra legwork can prevent you from making some expensive errors. This year in particular, retirees — and taxpayers 65 and older who are still in the workforce — have a slew of new rules, deductions and changes to keep in mind.Here are eight costly mistakes tax pros say you should avoid and their recommendations for what to do instead. USE LINK BELOW TO READ THE ARTICLE. https://www.aarp.org/money/taxes/avoid-costly-tax-mistakes/

FROM THE ARTICLE: We’ve endorsed federal legislation that addresses the financial vulnerability of women retirees. By Emily Paulin & Natalie Missakian, AARP. Published March 18, 2025. Women often earn less money than men throughout their careers and are more likely to leave the workforce to take on family caregiving responsibilities. That may leave them in a precarious position as they approach retirement.That’s why AARP is backing federal legislation that would improve financial security for older American women and provide resources to help them be independent in retirement. USE THE LINK BELOW TO READ THE ARTICLE: https://www.aarp.org/politics-society/advocacy/info-2025/protect-womens-retirement-savings.html

There is a wide and growing, gap between those who have in the world, and those who don't.  Not only is the gap growing but so is the un-willingness to address it in any meaningful way that gets toward actual resolution of the problems at hand and/or, especially, its root causes, which are many, by those who have.  The 2014 economic conference at Davos, Switzerland was supposedly focused on issues of the widening gap between the rich and poor and how to work toward alleviating it.   Almost no time was devoted to this.  Hmmmmm. In the US are many new retirees who are stuck at  minimum Social Security benefits forever, due to having to start their payments early at 62 in order to have ANY income at all.  These decisions are not made of freedom but of necessity - decisions made under duress.  With no other income, the arithmetic does not work out at all for living.  This is existence, not living!  If one is forced to do file early and

FROM THE ARTICLE. House Passes Bill to Boost Social Security’s Customer Service Budget. Measure headed to Senate also calls on agency to avoid closing field offices. By Deirdre Shesgreen, AARP. Published January 23, 2026. The U.S. House of Representatives passed a major spending bill on Jan. 22 that would give the Social Security Administration (SSA) an additional $50 million for customer service for the remainder of fiscal year 2026, which runs through Sept. 30. The bill now heads to the Senate. It must be approved by both houses of Congress and signed by President Donald Trump by Jan. 30 to avert another government shutdown. USE LINK BELOW TO READ THE ARTICLE. https://www.aarp.org/social-security/customer-service-budget-bill/

My spouse recently died at age 72. I’m 75, but receive a lower SS benefit than her because I retired early to take care of her. Am I entitled to receive any of her SS benefits in addition to my own? If yes, what percentage, and how do I apply for these benefits? (The month of her death, January, 2026, SS placed her regular benefit amount in our checking account as it normally does, but then withdrew the full amount one day later). Thank you for your help!  

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Hi - I've been working at the same university for 40 years and am in the process of trying to figure out when to retire.  However, our representative in the Benefits Office seems confused about details of the pension and retirement accounts for longer-service employees.  Many of us were grandfathered in to maintain our original pension benefits, but few people in that office have been around very long.  This has led to multiple cases of people receiving incorrect information, but the university won't address this issue.  What can we do to get accurate information?

Regarding the article in the AARP Bulletin in the January / February edition: "WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT TODAY'S MOST POPULAR ANNUITIES, They promise income ... at a price" by Karen Hube my comment is as follows: The biggest issue is only tangentially mentioned.  The conclusion of most annuities is the surrender of your money / investment when you die.  If you outlive your actuarial age, then you have nothing to lose, and would have profited from receiving more than your investment, at the expense of those who die earlier than their actuarial age which IS mentioned in the article. But the comparison that is not mentioned is that you could conceivably, ON YOUR OWN or through a financial advisor, make investments that could mimic annuity returns.  The difference is that your own investment stays with your estate when your die.  If you have no heirs and don't care about family or generational estate planning then this is fine.  However, if you do care about fam

Many people look to annuities to help with having a guaranteed income when they don't have pensions (which would be most boomers). With annuities you give a lump sum to a company (this is actually in many respects insurance). They give you a monthly benefit for the terms of the agreement, sometimes only the first 5 or 10 years is a guaranteed rate that is high and after that the guaranteed rate is pretty low (although what you can get can be higher based on how they invested your money). Pay attention to this kind of fine print. If the company that has your annuity money goes bankrupt the amount of protection you have varies depending on where your money is. If the company makes risky investments and loses money you may find your annuity payments at risk.Here are some issues:  1) Inflation - one rule of thumb is that costs double every 11 years. Will your annuity be inflation adjusted? And yes you pay more for that. 2) Where exactly is your money? The grow

 Hello,My goal is to in April next year to semi-retire, mainly stop working for my current company. I want to take the 401K and my Rollover IRA and pull the money out and pay taxes upfront, and then move the contents of both into what will be then a tax free account. Maybe create a new whatever type of account that allows me to pull out money tax-free. I know a high-yield Savings account where the money there has already had the taxes paid would work but 4% on a high-yield savings doesn't compare to a 10% stocks account of sorts. So I think it is better to create a new account for investing. What be the best route for my goal?

FROM THE ARTICLE - SEE ARTICLE FOR MORE!!! How to Save Like a 401(k) Millionaire. More Americans than ever have seven-figure nest eggs; this blueprint can help build yours. By Tamara E. Holmes, AARP. Published July 22, 2024. Who wants to be a 401(k) millionaire? Most of us, probably. And those who make it are growing in number. Fidelity Investments, one of the biggest retirement plan providers, reported a record 485,000 seven-figure accounts among its 401(k) plan holders in the first quarter of 2024, a 43 percent increase from a year earlier. https://www.aarp.org/retirement/planning-for-retirement/info-2024/401k-millionaire-saving-tips.html

FROM THE ARTICLE: 5 Steps for Couples to Make a Staggered Retirement Work.Spouses who don’t leave the workforce together often face financial and emotional challenges. By Diane Harris, AARP. Published April 08, 2025. It's a common dream of togetherness for older spouses: Nearly two-thirds of still-working couples expect to retire at the same time or within a year of each other, according to an April 2024 report from Ameriprise Financial.But those expectations rarely meet reality. The Ameriprise survey found that only 11 percent of retired couples leave their careers simultaneously, and 62 percent retire more than a year apart. USE LINK BELOW TO READ THE ARTICLE: https://www.aarp.org/money/retirement/married-couple-split-retirement/

 I'm trying to find out how people who have used Trust&Will to set up a Trust like it.  Would you recommend it?  Any downsides?  Anything you would do differently?

FROM THE ARTICLE: 8 Lessons Retirees Can Learn From Past Bear Markets.Downturns are never fun, but understanding historical trends can help steady nerves. By David Rodeck, AARP. Published April 22, 2025. market downturns can feel like a gut punch. Your portfolio reflects years of savings and earnings, and it’s hard to watch it spiral. What's a retiree to do at such stomach-churning times?Very little, advises Tara Lawson, a wealth strategist at U.S. Bank Private Wealth Management. “It is essential not to panic and remember that market corrections, while unpleasant, are a normal part of investing,” she says. USE THE LINK BELOW TO READ THE ARTICLE: https://www.aarp.org/money/personal-finance/past-bear-market-lessons/

FROM THE ARTICLE: 10 Ways to Fail at Retirement.Avoid these hazards to your money, health and happiness as you step away from work. By Bruce Horovitz, AARP. Published June 03, 2025 It's not hard to find information on the things to do before you retire. Buckets of ink and billions of pixels have been expended explaining them. Yet many retirees still feel bored, isolated or stressed after leaving the workaday grind behind.Maybe what they need is a bit of negative reinforcement — a fail-to-do guide, if you will. There are, after all, many things — critical things — that people manage to not do before or during retirement. Many are financial, but some involve physical, mental and emotional well-being. USE THE LINK BELOW TO READ THE ARTICLE. https://www.aarp.org/money/retirement/avoid-retirement-fails/

Anthem is outsourcing work to vendors in an effort to call their insureds on the phone to sell them other services.  In doing this, they are breaking a cardinal information security rule - they are calling you and asking you to authenticate your identity by giving them your sensitive personal information.  When you call them, that kind of request is certainly in order.  If they call you, they should already have it.    I refused to give it to them (multiple calls).  To quote banks and insurance companies:  “ We will never call you and ask for your personal information.”  It won’t take scammers long to figure out that Anthem is making such calls, and they will start calling too, for the purpose of identity fraud.  Be vigilant!

FROM THE ARTICLE. Court documents say an employee with the Department of Government Efficiency agreed to share sensitive data with an outside advocacy group. By Deirdre Shesgreen, AARP. Published January 21, 2026. AARP is urging the Social Security Administration (SSA) to take immediate steps to ensure Americans’ private data is protected, after revelations that a non-SSA employee signed a secret agreement to share sensitive SSA data with an outside advocacy group last year. In a Jan. 16 court filing, Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyers disclosed that an employee with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) – a federal cost-cutting initiative – agreed to share SSA data with an unidentified political advocacy group. USE LINK BELOW TO READ THE ARTICLE. https://www.aarp.org/social-security/ssa-data-security/

I have seen new rules coming for Senior drivers or already in effect. Although I have not received anything from local DMV office. I saw something on Youtube  Wonder if this is true?

FROM THE ARTICLE. 13 Ways to Stick to Your Retirement Budget in 2026. How to save more and spend less in the new year. By Bruce Horovitz and Daniel Bortz, AARP. Published January 05, 2026. For retirees on fixed incomes, setting and sticking to a budget has never been more critical. Even though income is limited, many expenses are not. Health costs, for example, can be wildly unpredictable for people over 65. Rising prices of consumer goods is also putting pressure on older adults' wallets.If the past is any predictor of the future, there’s lots of budgeting work to be done. When asked what financial challenges they faced in 2024, 28 percent of Gen Xers (ages 44 to 59) and 14 percent of boomers (ages 60 to 78) said they took on debt, and 19 percent of Gen Xers and 13 percent of boomers said they depleted their savings, according to a survey by Credit Karma, a consumer financial platform. USE LINK BELOW TO READ THE ARTICLE. https://www.aarp.org/money/persona

We recently received an email from AARP requesting us to email Congress for the continued funding of Social Security. While this is a worthwhile endeavor, it does not provide a solution and who knows how many folks will actually send the message. So, I am advocating for AARP to be more proactive in how they and their members reach out to Congress. AARP should have some political clout and therefore should use it to our advantage. The unions would be another avenue to pursue! There is a report authored by the Congressional Research Service titled, “Social Security: Raising or Eliminating the Taxable Earnings Base”. This report (https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/rl/rl32896) was updated on December 22, 2021. The conclusion of this report is as follows:“Raising or eliminating the cap on wages that are subject to taxes could reduce the long-range deficit in the Social Security trust funds. For example, the Social Security Administration's Office of the Chief Actuary

I am planning on going on vacation abroad for 32 days.  I get monthly SS checks electronically for retirement only.  I will not make any changes to my payment method.  Do I need to let SSA know when I am leaving and coming back?

Anyone else out there thinking this is the beginning, not the end? I'm researching grad school and dreaming about a new and fulfilling encore career. I'd like to hear your experiences. Did you do an in-person or an online program? Were you accepted by the other students even though you were older? What were the rewards and the challenges?

The website for Social Security used to say that it would take up to 30 days to process new applications for retirement benefits.  In a week it will have been three months.  Now the website says 2-4 weeks, but that has got to still be wrong.I gather from other forums, that a delay of 2-3 months is now normal.What I would like to know is, why?Every time I try to search for information, all of the results are about disability, not retirement.  And not a single results explains why it is taking so long when they already have my entire work history of 47 years, etc.  They have all the information they need.What exactly is it that they do to process applications which turns 2-4 weeks into 2-3 months.Does anyone know why?I cannot work a job right now, my arthritis is too painful.  I can't wait more months to begin getting retirement checks, I will be homeless.

Today I will be discussing a type of scam that doesn't initially set off any red flags but the more you talk the more suspicious it becomes. This scam has been plaguing dating apps for some time; the main premises of this scam is for the scammer to get the victim to send explicit or revealing photos to the scammer. Who is posing as a beautiful woman on a dating site, then using those photos to blackmail a victim usually stating that the scammer will send the photos to loved ones and or your job unless a ransom is paid. I recently found myself as a potential victim of one of these scams. I was using a dating app and I seemed to match with this girl who was not far from me and recently moved from Oklahoma. I began a conversation that would last two weeks before she sent me her phone number. Me being me, I did a reverse phone number search and found that this number was registered to an elderly man in Texas. This was the first red flag I encountered, upon texting her directly the conversa