Medical Reimbursement Accounts

What is retirement, really? We think we know. So, we do our best to prepare for both current circumstances and as many surprises as we can conjure up.  After all, with people living longer than ever before your money has to last longer than ever before.

“Will I outlive my money?” That’s one of the biggest concerns for most retirees. There’s the high cost of medical care, which gets more expensive all the time. There’s inflation, which raises the cost of goods and services, eating into your retirement budget.

You spend a lifetime earning, saving, acquiring. But the old adage is true—you can’t take it with you. So, what do you do with your assets when you’re gone? How do you want them distributed? That’s where a good estate plan comes in.

Income is the lifeblood of retirement.  In Part 1, wisdom from the early chapters of Jim Otar’s new book about retiree income challenges is explored. A one-person revolutionary.

Jay Powell’s 2018 case for his economic “boom”, the one which was presumably behind his hawkish aggression, rested largely upon the unemployment rate alone. A curiously thin roster for a period of purported economic acceleration, one of the few sets joining that particular headline statistic in its optimism resides in the lower tiers of all statistics.

After a record three straight months of decline for the seasonally-adjusted core CPI March through May 2020, it turned upward again in June. Buoyed by a partially reopened economy, the price discounting (prerequisite to the Big D) took at least one month off.

Why only half a “V?” If the latest PMI’s are anywhere close to accurate, and they don’t have to be all that close, then the production side of the economy may have stalled out somewhere nearer the trough of this contraction. The promise of May’s big payroll report surprise has dissipated in more than just the bond market.

If the recession was the first “shoe to drop”, what’s the second…or third? The shock of the self-inflicted COVID recession is behind us. What we’re all wondering now is what comes next? Will the economy recover to its previous state? Something better? Something worse? That will be determined by the second and third-order effects and they are already starting.