Everyone wants more security for their retirement savings, and outside of Social Security, the most reliable way to achieve this is often the much-maligned annuity. The main issue for many people is losing control of a large chunk of their retirement pot—they simply don’t like the idea. But what if you could get some of the security an annuity provides without giving up control of your cash?
No solution is perfect, but this idea might be of interest.

In addition to my dad, my mom wanted someone else to know of a stash of cash she had hidden in the hem of the bedroom curtains. A fall resulted in a hospital stay and rehab for mom, and my dad needed to move in with me due to his health. I went upstairs to retrieve mom’s mad money and found an envelope with 70 neatly stacked $100 bills.
A few years later my mother in law was forced from her condo by a fire.

Almost half of working-age adults are not paying into a private or workplace pension, the government revealed this week. This headline caught my attention while browsing the BBC News website the other day, and it really made me think!
This is an awful lot of people imperiling their future lives, and with the UK’s pension auto-enrollment system, now in its tenth year of operation, seeming to be pretty successful, it would suggest people are actively going out of their way to opt out of the system.

ACCORDING TO THE World Happiness Report, Finland ranks as the happiest nation in the world, a title it’s held for eight years in a row.
Each time this report is updated, it makes the news for a day or two but then fades. That’s for good reason, I think. As much as Finland might be a nice place, it isn’t necessarily practical to suggest that anyone pick up and move.
The good news, though,

I’VE ALWAYS BEEN a saver, and perhaps even pathologically frugal. Growing up, it pained me to spend money, even on food when I was hungry. Today, I have more than enough money, but I still resist paying full price for food.
Perhaps I’m just genetically frugal, or perhaps my feelings about money reflect my parents and my upbringing. My mom once shared that her aunt predicted that she’d make lots of money, but it would be like grains of rice and slip through her fingers. Meanwhile,

WHEN I WAS GROWING up, I’d receive Series E savings bonds as birthday gifts from my parents. It was the start of many to come. My parents had great respect for savings bonds and, as I got older, I came to hold them in high regard as well.
Savings bonds never offered the highest interest rate. At a defense plant where I worked, a guy in the accounting department questioned my bond buying. He noted that savings bonds paid less interest than the certificates of deposit then available.