What you need to know.

When you reach age 70½, the Internal Revenue Service instructs you to start making withdrawals from your traditional IRA(s).These withdrawals are also called Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs). You will make them, annually, from now on.¹

If you fail to take your annual RMD or take out less than the required amount, the I.R.S. will notice. You will not only owe income taxes on the amount not withdrawn, you will owe 50% more. (The 50% penalty can be waived if you can show the I.R.S. that the shortfall resulted from a “reasonable error” instead of negligence.)¹

Many IRA owners have questions about the rules related to their initial RMDs, so let’s answer a few.

Not all gifts are taxable.

I’d like for you to meet my friend, Hugh. He’s a retired film stuntman who, after a long career, is enjoying his retirement. Some of what he’s enjoying about his retirement is sharing part of his accumulated wealth with his family, specifically his wife and two sons. Like many Americans, Hugh likes to make sure that, when he’s sharing that wealth, he isn’t giving the I.R.S. any overtime.

The important question: Are you prepared?

Addressing the potential threat of long-term care expenses may be one of the biggest financial challenges for individuals who are developing a retirement strategy.

The right moves for every age.

Have you ever mapped out your financial timeline? If you’re like many Americans, it may have been more difficult than anticipated. One of the most helpful ways to achieve your financial goals is to break it down by your age. After all, depending where you are on life’s journey, certain financial moves make more sense than others. Read on to learn more.

A radical new approach to working, saving, and retiring.

Retire before 50 and live your best life. That is the message of the FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) movement, which is drawing interest worldwide.

Your financial future is up to you and no one else.

What will be your future? You know that solid retirement strategy takes your time horizon, an often unpredictable factor, into consideration. Your thinking must include an awareness of how long you must save for and what sort of expenditures may be ahead.

Expect volatility, but avoid letting the headlines alter your plans.

Recent headlines have added volatility to the markets. There will always be new headlines, and any of them could mean turbulence for Wall Street.

Welcome to our last piece in our annuity series! Today we’re going to get into some very applicable information: how Creekmur Wealth does annuities and why we use them. We recommend that you have the 201, 202, and 203 handouts handy while you read this in case you need a refresher on how each type of annuity works.

Welcome back to our series on annuities! You’ve now made it into the challenge section of our annuity series. In these final pieces, we will take a more subjective approach to annuities. Today, we are going to break down how annuities are typically advertised and what we believe is wrong about some of those marketing methods. We’ll take a look at general annuity marketing and then go through each type of annuity individually.

Today we will cover the last type of annuity: fixed index annuities. This type of annuity guarantees no loss of principal due to the market fluctuations and interest earned is linked to the performance of an external market index. Fixed index annuities first appeared in the 1990’s as an alternative to traditional fixed annuities.