Retirement News & Advice

Talking to your parents about growing old and their plans for the future is hard to do. After all, they still remember changing your diapers. What could you possibly know that they don't?

Talking about their money is even harder -- worse than talking about sex. And you remember that awkward conversation, don't you?

Here are seven ways to break the ice on some of the toughest conversations that you and your mom and dad should have.

Retirement savers are back on track after the 2008 stock market downturn, according to a report from Fidelity Investments, the nation's largest provider of workplace retirement savings plans.

Fidelity reported that the average 401(k) savings reached a 10-year high at the end of 2010 with the average saver putting away 8.2% of their paychecks, before the employer match. Employers typically kick in another 50% of employee contributions up to 6% saved, Fidelity says.

This isn't an ugly mother-in-law story. Actually, I loved my mother-in-law, and her death at 85 was painful -- far more painful than it really needed to be because she hated to talk about what she considered her personal affairs -- especially when it involved money. And the rest of us didn't want to bring up the subject either. Honestly, I would rather have asked her about her sex life than explore what she intended to do with the cash she had spent her lifetime squirreling away.

Death snuck up on my mother-in-law. On New Year's Eve, she was out with eight of her widowed friends until after 1 a.m. and 15 days later, we held the funeral service. For at least the next six months, we're going to be sorting through the confusion, trying to decide what Mom would have wanted.

If you're a mom (or a dad), vow not to put your kids through this kind of hell when you go to heaven. Here are 10 pieces of estate planning information they'll need to put you and your affairs to rest.

Baby Boomers hit a big milestone this year: the oldest will be hitting 65, what was once called the Golden Years. For the next 19 years, 10,000 of them will mark this big occasion every day, according to Pew Research Center.

To help them navigate this new era and the growing pains that come with it, here are five tips from Jodi Olshevski, head of The Hartford Advance 50 Team, and Lisa Lobo, a Hartford consumer insurance specialist:

Why aren't we saving more money?

According to a Harris Poll released early this month, 27% of Americans have no personal savings and 34% have nothing saved for retirement.

Of course, not all the news is bad. As a country, we're beginning to spend more than we did just a year ago when we were in the grips of the Great Recession, as The New York Times recently pointed out.

According to the same article, we were also saving more last year (in the second quarter of 2009, Americans socked away 7% of their disposable income, versus only 5.3% in December of 2010), the question is, why aren't we still saving? Clearly, we all can -- we just don't. Here are some of the excuses we typically offer up to explain why we don't save more. Let's see if we can't debunk them.

Part of planning for retirement is a math exercise -- figuring out how much money you have, how much you need and how to best save enough to build a big enough nest egg before you hang up your work boots.

It's not calculus, but figuring this out without help isn't easy either. Fortunately, there are dozens of free online calculators that will help you. Here are six of the best.

It was too good to last. For years, I (and every other financial expert on the planet) was able to tell people that they could tap Social Security at age 62, pay the money back later on – no interest required – and draw a higher payout years down the road. It was perfect. In effect, a no-cost loan from the government, making up for all those years you let Uncle Sam hang on to more of your tax dollars than he was entitled.

Well, those days are gone – or at least they've been minimized. New rules from the Social Security Administration put a cap of a single year on the amount of time you have to apply, pay back and apply again. It's not worth the trouble. But strategizing to get the most you possibly can from Social Security – a key part of most retiree's paychecks – is worth more time and energy than many people give it. Here are a few tactics to keep in your back pocket:

Living off a retirement nest egg can be a daunting prospect. Even if you've saved diligently, converting that money to a monthly paycheck is no slam dunk.

So we asked retirement planner ING Financial Services to help us analyze what it takes to produce $1,000 a month in steady income to augment a pension and/or Social Security, for a minimum of 20 years from retirement at 65. We picked 20 years because Social Security's Life Expectancy tables predict:

• A man reaching age 65 today can expect to live, on average, until age 83.
• A woman turning age 65 today can expect to live, on average, until age 85.

Thanks to Lynne Ford, CEO of ING Individual Retirement, here are our recipes for turning a 401(k) or other retirement savings into a regular income.

As we've pointed out recently, many Americans aren't making the right choices when it comes to being financially ready for retirement. A combination of misinformation and an unwillingness to confront sometimes difficult, expensive realities make it all too easy to just ignore our looming financial needs.

Unfortunately, those needs are likely to grow rather than go away, so we need to be ready and have a plan if our retirement years are to be economically comfortable. If you're at all confused about just how much you should be saving for retirement and which financial products for retirees will help you get there, read on to find out where Americans who are nearing or already in retirement should focus their resources -- and where they should skip.