There will be no cost-of-living increase for 57 million Social Security beneficiaries next year because consumer prices have fallen, the Social Security Administration announced on Thursday.
Question: I always heard that you will need 80% or so of your working salary to live on in retirement. But is that a percentage of your gross income or your take-home pay? --Mary Taylor, Chalfont, Pennsylvania
Maryland is the nation's top-earning state for the third year in a row, with a median household income of $70,545 in 2008, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report released Monday.
There are a number of ways to measure the financial turbulence of the past year: the billions of dollars in public funds used to prop up banks; the cliff-drop in exports from any major economy; or the latest unemployment report.
Here are the five things mothers should know to protect their families' finances.
Americans are losing confidence in their ability to keep their current standard of living, a new national poll indicates.
Americans are losing confidence in their ability to keep their current standard of living, a new national poll indicates.
Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts renewed his call for higher judicial pay on Wednesday, warning of long-term damage to the fabric of the courts.
QUEENS, N.Y. -- Now this is what college should look like.
A falling dollar is making the United States a cheaper place for foreigners to live - just as other countries are getting harder on American wallets.
There will be no cost-of-living increase for 57 million Social Security beneficiaries next year because consumer prices have fallen, the Social Security Administration announced on Thursday.
Question: I always heard that you will need 80% or so of your working salary to live on in retirement. But is that a percentage of your gross income or your take-home pay? --Mary Taylor, Chalfont, Pennsylvania
Maryland is the nation's top-earning state for the third year in a row, with a median household income of $70,545 in 2008, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report released Monday.
There are a number of ways to measure the financial turbulence of the past year: the billions of dollars in public funds used to prop up banks; the cliff-drop in exports from any major economy; or the latest unemployment report.
Here are the five things mothers should know to protect their families' finances.
Americans are losing confidence in their ability to keep their current standard of living, a new national poll indicates.
Americans are losing confidence in their ability to keep their current standard of living, a new national poll indicates.
Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts renewed his call for higher judicial pay on Wednesday, warning of long-term damage to the fabric of the courts.
QUEENS, N.Y. -- Now this is what college should look like.
A falling dollar is making the United States a cheaper place for foreigners to live - just as other countries are getting harder on American wallets.
Bond prices sank on Wednesday amid fresh concerns over inflation, after the most recent Consumer Price Index report showed a surprising surge.
If you'd like to build a nest egg with your paycheck, it may be time to give up New York and head for Plano, Texas.
The cost of living rose in May as consumers were belted by energy costs, the government said Friday.
The Gulf may still be booming but inflation - and skyrocketing prices - is making life tough for the workforce.
Greg Allan, 38, an officer in the Marines, and his wife Laurie, 39, a marketing director, are used to uprooting themselves for his job. Married in 2001, they bounced from Honolulu to Yucca Valley, Calif. before landing in Yuma, Ariz. in 2003.
The more than 53 million Social Security beneficiaries will receive a 3.3 percent cost-of-living adjustment in 2007, the Social Security Administration reported Wednesday.
Parties with a vested interest in your retirement savings - employers, investment firms, employee advocates, you name it - hotly contested most of the provisions in the recently passed Pension Protection Act of 2006.
Making $100,000 or more is nothing to sneeze at.
The vodka may be cheap, but according to the latest cost-of-living survey from Mercer Consulting, Moscow now ranks as the world's most expensive city, edging out Tokyo, which held the No. 1 spot for four straight years.
Below are the remarks by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke at the International Monetary Conference Monday, according to the Fed's Web site.
Here are the minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee's meeting on March 27 and March 28:
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) - Say you and your spouse want to relocate to a new city.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) - A lot of people will tell you they think their taxes are too high.
More Americans are using the holidays as a time to encourage saving rather than spending, according to a new survey.
ese days and you'll see that the demographic landscape has changed: Seniors by the score are now mixed in among the dewy coeds, attending classes, queuing up for cultural offerings and just soaking up the energy. It shouldn't come as a surprise. For a large number of retirees, easy access to cultural events and educational opportunities has always been at least as important as year-round sunshine and well-groomed golf courses. And a collegiate environment has even more appeal in the new era of retirement, in which it's increasingly important to continue expanding your skills and knowledge base well beyond traditional retirement age. Many universities have responded by creating academic courses specifically for seniors. A decade ago, only a few dozen colleges offered such programs; today more than 300 institutions do. Other schools allow seniors to audit classes at little or no cost, fund community programs for older folks and even build housing for them. ...
Until recently, anyone over 60 spotted around a university campus was presumed to be either a professor or an aging alum riding a nostalgia trip. But walk the streets of almost any college town the...
Ta dah! To nobody's surprise who has ever lived -- or even visited -- there, Manhattan is the most expensive place in the United States.
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - More than 52 million recipients of Social Security and supplemental benefits will see a 4.1 percent bump in their monthly payments come 2006, the Social Security Administration said Friday.
Today the leading edge of the nation's 76 million boomers will turn 59 1/2 years old. This means they'll be able to withdraw money from their retirement accounts without the threat of paying withdrawal penalties.
I'm 38 years old and I invest $1,650 a month into a portfolio of 10 mutual funds that now has a balance of $165,000. If I continue doing this will I have enough to retire?
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Pride aside, it really doesn't matter how much you make, just so long as it goes a long way where you live.
Bonds rose and the dollar fell immediately after the widely watched Consumer Price Index, minus food and energy prices, came in flat.
For nearly 20 years, Bert Sperling has been analyzing data about people and places. He helps people decide which city is good for them and the factors they need to consider. Sperling spoke to CNN Business Traveller on super-commuting and the pursuit for quality of life.
Hong Kong for the taxes and food, Paris for the café culture and Dublin for the compact social scene -- a growing number of executives are making a conscious choice about where they want to base their lives.
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Amid the rancorous debates over adding individual investment accounts to Social Security, a basic fact is often overshadowed.
It was starting to look like the coast was clear. We've seen some good economic news lately: Corporate earnings growing at a double-digit pace, interest rates staying near historic lows, and even s...
Dear Armchair Millionaire: My husband and I are seriously considering relocating to another country for retirement. What are the financial issues we should consider in this kind of move? -- Ready to Retire
Social Security beneficiaries will see an average of nearly $25 a month more next year under a cost-of-living adjustment announced Tuesday, but almost half of that increase will be taken up by higher Medicare premiums.
It may come as no surprise that where you live affects your salary.
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - The dishes pile high, the dust balls multiply.
Tokyo's consumer price index fell 0.1 percent year on year to 97.4 in June, according to preliminary data released Friday by the Ministry of Public Management.
Let's just call it what it is: gaming the system. And it's a game that has already resulted in skyrocketing tax increases and the loss of public services across the country--from the shutdown of li...
The best sign that you've really, truly grown up may be having fantasies of retirement. Perhaps it's days in the garden or on the links; perhaps it's volunteering at a local soup kitchen, taking th...
Retirement. It's a daydream that for many of us involves visions of 10 a.m. tee times, 3 p.m. naps and 6 p.m. mojitos by the pool. Or maybe of teaching a course at the local college, learning to fl...
In 1960, Alfred Hitchcock filmed the horror classic Psycho for about $1 million. This summer, Warner Bros. released The Perfect Storm, a movie that cost a reported $140 million. Is the staggering d...
Picking a place to retire sounds easy enough: Just grab a map, find a town with clear skies and balmy weather, buy some sunblock, move, relax.
It might make life easier if we all agreed about what's most important in a hometown--if we could somehow forge an ironclad rule about what makes a city, big or small, the best place to live. Of co...
The U.S. economy has been cruising at warp speed, consumer confidence is riding high, stock prices have doubled over the past three years--and every day it seems another RedInk.com IPO has made ins...
DEAR ANNIE: Help! I recently moved to a city where the cost of living is much higher than it is in my old hometown. It took me a little while to realize this, and in the meantime I gave a prospecti...
Even before the market sell-off this summer whacked a good 20% or so off the balances of many portfolios, a chorus of doomsayers had been warning that vast numbers of us are headed for a retirement...
Once upon a time in the world inhabited by our parents, people spent most of their adult lives working for one or two companies. In return for such loyalty, many employers provided lavish pensions,...
Social Security as you know it is about to disappear. In its place will likely be a federal retirement system that forces today's workers to save more on their own and that pays out smaller benefit...
Forget politics. It's economics that makes for really strange bedfellows. Take the increasingly popular idea that the consumer price index overstates inflation. Bunkmates as odd as Bill Clinton, Bo...
"In Boston," Mark Twain wrote in 1899, "they ask, 'How much does he know?' In New York, 'How much is he worth?' In Philadelphia, 'Who were his parents?'" In Seattle, 100 years later, they ask, "Did...
Does the consumer price index (CPI), the government's most widely used measure of inflation, actually overstate the true cost of living? That might not be the uppermost question in your mind as you...
According to conventional wisdom, you shouldn't leave your current job for a new one unless it offers at least a 15% salary increase. But when the job requires that you move to another city, you ne...
APRIL 1996 MAY MARK THE BEGINNING OF the end of the Social Security system as Americans have known it for 60 years. Sometime this spring, the Clinton Administration's 13-member Advisory Council on ...
Most likely Frank Sinatra's "South of the Border" isn't the first tune that comes to mind when you think about retirement. But Mexico and a handful of other foreign havens have been attracting incr...
Retirees in america have never been more prosperous, but one financial goblin still haunts them: inflation. Common wisdom holds that retirees depend on fixed income from bonds and pensions, leaving...
What follows are profiles of 50 other cities that cut a truly international figure. Not all are favorite vacation spots or hotbeds of cosmopolitan glamour. But Cincinnati and Dubai, just as much as...
The gaps between the princely pensions that public employees often collect and what the rest of us get are so astounding that they seem to have been exaggerated by a task force of bureaucrat-bashin...
IF YOU HAVE EVER DREAMED ABOUT retirement -- and in the job-stressed '90s, who hasn't? -- you probably pictured something like this: a spacious condo, perhaps adjacent to a closely manicured fairwa...
You know you must save regularly and invest wisely to have enough money for a secure and worry-free retirement. But how much is enough? Sure, you'll probably have a pension and Social Security, but...
ALMOST NOBODY -- in business or government -- would disagree with this statement: ''Today America is part of a truly global economy. To maintain our standard of living, we must learn to compete in ...
How are you doing? To help readers keep their finances on track, MONEY first asked that question in a December 1986 cover story. The world was very different then. The economic outlook seemed brigh...
The day after casting a crucial vote for President Clinton's budget plan in the House, Timothy Penny (D-Minnesota) announced that he would not seek a seventh term. Penny, 41, cited family reasons, ...
Snip, snip, snip. listen closely and you'll hear it: the sound of budgets being cut across the U.S. Battered first by recession and now by a sputtering recovery, Americans are taking a scissors to ...
While politicians from Western states loudly decry any proposal to lift gasoline taxes, nary a peep has been heard from states about to be hammered by an income-tax rate hike -- from 31% to 36% -- ...
WHEN YOU come down to it, the purpose of work and investment is to live well today and better tomorrow. That depends on each worker and machine yielding a growing output of ever more valuable goods...
More than a year has passed since Newton and Suzanne Fink got religion, so to speak, on the subject of their finances. The Fort Lupton, Colo. couple, both devout Methodists, had borrowed freely whi...
With the U.S. economy limping toward an anemic recovery one day and slip- sliding back into recession the next, it's no wonder the national mood is so gloomy. The ABC/MONEY Consumer Comfort Index -...
''Who did this to us? Who stole our standard of living?'' According to high-minded Bill Moyers of Public Television, these are the questions the next generation of Americans will ask. Bill fears th...
Before we retreated from Vietnam, suffered through the 1970s oil shock and got used to walking past homeless people on our city streets, John Wayne reigned as the archetypal American -- riding high...
ALBANY, NEW YORK -- Slow growth typical of older Northeastern cities, low unemployment, and the difficulty of getting anyone outside state government to move there may turn companies away from New ...
AFTER three decades of social and economic upheaval, the contours of a new American middle class are starting to emerge. It is bigger, more diverse, more resilient, and on the whole richer than eve...
If you're like many middle-class working Americans, you're not overly optimistic about what you will eventually get from Social Security. In a recent poll of 300 MONEY subscribers conducted by the ...
Once again the federal budget has been elevated to crisis status. After several years of solid reductions, the deficit will balloon to approximately $180 billion in fiscal 1990. If you include the ...
In December 1987, the benefits department at GPU Nuclear in Parsippany, N.J. made Raymond Russo, the utility's 59-year-old director of facilities, an irresistible offer: an instant 37% boost in his...
Le Corbusier, France's foremost 20th-century architect, called a house ''a machine for living.'' For someone who bought one a decade or more ago, when inflation was bumping up prices at annual rate...
EVERY CITY has particular charms: If you are a fanatic about frozen custard, you may never be happy anywhere except Milwaukee. But to rank America's top ten cities for business, FORTUNE sought obje...
May your hands always be busy May your feet always be swift May you have a strong foundation When the winds of changes shift . . . May you stay forever young. -- ''Forever Young,'' by Bob Dylan, 48...
Five years ago, Vi McAllister was the benefits administrator for Superior Oil in Houston and was closing in on a comfortable retirement. She planned to call it quits and collect a full pension when...
Contrary to what life insurance agents may tell you, the coverage you need most isn't whole life, universal life, variable life or even universal variable life. It's disability income insurance. Th...
Three years ago Tim George, now 33, was making $17,000 a year teaching world history to 10th-graders at a private high school in Honolulu. ''Besides the terrible pay, I was putting in 60-hour weeks...
IN THEIR Report to the Forty-First President of the United States of America, Gerald R. Ford, President No. 38, and Jimmy Carter, No. 39, offer this observation: ''Americans are ready to do what ha...
ENTER the strange world of Social Security, as exotically inside out as the domain of black holes and anti-matter that physicists describe. Within the borders of this unexpected land the U.S. runs ...
Drumroll, please. The winner of this year's survey of the best places to live in the U.S.A. is a booming New York City exurb with country charm: Danbury, Conn. The Danbury metropolitan area, situat...
A nationally syndicated editorial cartoon recently showed a corpulent, cane- & carrying, white-haired lady brandishing a submachine gun. The caption read: ''The reason Congress doesn't touch Social...
Your freedom in retirement can be awesome. Not only can you do anything you want, but you can also live anyplace you please. Only one in four retirees is as yet daring enough to follow the sun or s...
THINK OF the American Association of Retired Persons as grandfather, very big and very rich. AARP has an astounding 28 million members, almost 12% of the U.S. population, and annual revenues of abo...
-- By the time this issue of FORTUNE reaches readers, we hope that Congress and the White House will have agreed on a program to cut the budget deficit effectively enough to help calm the internati...
If you feel poorer today than 15 years ago, even though you are earning more money, you are not alone. For example, although the Money subscribers' median family income, as shown in the table below...
If you could live anywhere in the U.S., where would it be? San Francisco? New York City? Plains, Ga.? Various surveys, such as Rand McNally's Places Rated Almanac, have attempted to identify the mo...
On average, a premium Christmas tree costs the same as last year -- between $3 and $4 a foot in rural areas and roughly double that in urban locations. Otherwise, the price of the basic tree, depen...
WHAT BEGAN a few years ago as an apparent anomaly at a few corporations has become the biggest trend in U.S. labor relations today: companies demanding concessions -- on pay, benefits, work rules -...
FROM THE WAY negotiations are going at Chrysler Corp. over the soon-to-expire contract with the United Auto Workers, you'd hardly guess the company is coming off two years of record profits. Chairm...
to trim without hurting the poor. WASHINGTON'S deficit fighters have directed most of their firepower this year at such politically palatable targets as defense. But if Congress is truly going to g...
| Most Viewed | Most Emailed | Top Searches |
| Most Viewed | Most Emailed | Top Searches |
