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Deciding when to retire is one of the most important decisions you will make during the course of your life. It is one that should not be taken lightly or made hastily. Before you make the decision to call it quits and enjoy some well deserved relaxation, there are a few questions you should ask you...

Think that the time to plan for the 2009 tax year has come and gone? It's true that the door to almost all tax-saving moves for 2009 closed on Dec. 31, 2009. But there are still a few things you can do that will lower your 2009 taxes: Make regular IRA contributions. Contributions to traditional IR...

By now everyone has heard and read plenty about the bad loans of the big banks, their trading against their own customers and bonds deals, and their collapses and near-collapses. The giant bailouts have been exhaustively chronicled as have the banks' robust rebounds. But the history of the last 30 m...

In the last issue of Vanity Fair, Goldman Sachs president Gary Cohn and CFO David Viniar stated that their company would have been better off without government assistance throughout the financial crisis. This was just days after a New York Times article stated that several top lieutenants each dum...

Late yesterday after US financial markets had closed, the Federal Reserve Bank announced that it will raise the discount rate by a quarter of one percent from .50% to .75%. The discount rate is what the Fed charges for short-term loans to banks. Overnight, stock and bond markets in Asia and Europe...

When an employee leaves his or her job, they have a couple of different choices on what to do with their 401(k): 1) They can withdraw the money and spend it as they please, but this comes with a heavy price tag. All the money that is taken out of the plan becomes taxable income that they will h...

What do those two countries have to do with the price we'll pay at the pump this weekend? Stay with me - I promise to keep it short. You already know that Greece is in financial trouble. Rumored rescues for the profligate Peloponnese helped send our stock market higher yesterday. But today there...

The Dow Jones Industrial Average has been a standard by which to judge the US stock market for over a hundred years. As I write this the DJIA is up about 100 points to 10,134. Over the last week the average has dipped below then back above that magical 10,000 mark a number of times, inciting financi...

You can reverse a ROTH conversion if your investment goes south. If you convert an account in 2010, you'll have until Oct. 17, 2011, to "recharacterize" it back to traditional IRA status. So if the account tanks between now and then, you can use the recharacterization privilege to reverse the conver...

From early 2008 to March 2009 the S&P 500 lost more than half its value, a noticeable amount to say the least. As the house of cards began to fall people understandably began to become nervous. Many stopped contributing to their 401(k). Their thought was 'Isn't dumping money into a falling market li...