Retirement & Taxes
Long-term financial planning, retirement accounts, government benefits, tax law, and IRS rules. Covers the intersection of policy and personal finance that affects how people save, invest, and plan ahead.
Latest in Retirement & Taxes
Qualifying for both Medicare and Medicaid can cover nearly all out-of-pocket costs
For older Americans on a fixed income, the gap between what Medicare covers and what a patient pays can run into thousands of dollars a...
Turning 65 opens a six-month window to buy any Medigap policy without health questions
The single most valuable window in Medicare for a person turning 65 is one that closes quietly and never reopens on the same terms. For...
A widow who waits until survivor full retirement age can collect 100% of a late spouse’s check
Among the many timing rules in Social Security, one is unusually generous and unusually easy to forfeit. A surviving spouse who waits until reaching survivor...
A surviving military spouse can qualify for a tax-free VA payment of more than $1,600 a month
A monthly benefit that many military families never claim can be worth more than $1,600 a month, tax-free, for the rest of a surviving spouse’s...
Medicaid’s five-year look-back can delay nursing-home coverage over money or property given away recently
A gift that felt generous can quietly postpone the day Medicaid starts paying for a nursing home. When someone applies for long-term-care Medicaid, the state...
Some Medicare Advantage plans return part of your Part B premium as a give-back
A small but real perk buried inside some Medicare Advantage plans can put money back in a retiree’s pocket every month: the Part B give-back....
Once a Medicare drug plan’s yearly out-of-pocket limit is reached, covered prescriptions cost nothing more that year
Medicare’s Part D drug benefit now carries a hard ceiling on what a member pays out of pocket in a year, and once that limit...
A dropped Medicare Advantage plan opens a special enrollment window from December 8 through the end of February
When a Medicare Advantage plan is discontinued for 2027, the members it drops are not left to the ordinary enrollment calendar. Medicare grants them a...
A federal audit found thousands of widows lost millions by claiming Social Security survivor benefits too early
A watchdog inside Social Security itself has documented a costly pattern: surviving spouses, most of them widows, who claimed benefits earlier than they had to...
Social Security is letting more people apply online as it clears a disability backlog
Social Security has spent much of the past year trying to fix one of the most common complaints about the agency: the wait. According to...
Without a fix, Social Security could pay only about 78% of benefits in the 2030s, a roughly 22% cut
A single figure from Social Security’s own actuaries has become the most-cited number in retirement planning: about 78 percent. That is the share of scheduled...
Repeal of a decades-old penalty restored bigger Social Security checks for millions of retired teachers, police and firefighters
For more than four decades, two provisions buried in Social Security law quietly shrank the retirement checks of people who spent their careers teaching, policing...
A proposed IRS rule would require proof of citizenship to collect the refundable part of the child tax credit
The IRS has floated a rule that would attach a new condition to one of the most widely claimed tax benefits in the country: a...
Medicare’s next drug deal cuts prices on 15 more medicines and, for the first time, reaches doctor-administered drugs
Medicare’s second round of drug-price negotiations will set lower prices on 15 additional medications beginning January 1, 2027, and for the first time the program...
Ignore the letter dropping your Medicare Advantage plan for 2027 and you fall back to Original Medicare with no drug coverage
Medicare Advantage members whose plans will not return in 2027 begin receiving non-renewal notices this September, and the most expensive mistake is treating that letter...
A payable-on-death beneficiary lets a bank account skip probate and reach heirs directly
A single form at the bank can keep a checking or savings account out of probate entirely, sending the balance straight to a named person...
When one spouse enters a nursing home on Medicaid, the at-home spouse can keep the house and a car
A stay in a nursing home can cost more than $9,000 a month, and the fear that follows almost every family is the same one:...
Filing Form W-4V lets you have federal tax withheld from Social Security and avoid a surprise April bill
Retirees who owe tax on their Social Security benefits can arrange to have the money withheld before the check ever arrives, using a single one-page...
A free national search can turn up a lost pension from an employer that merged or shut down decades ago
Tens of millions of dollars in earned pension benefits sit uncollected across the country, waiting for people who moved, changed names, or simply lost track...
Roth 401(k) accounts no longer force required withdrawals during your lifetime
A quiet provision that took effect for the 2024 tax year removed one of the last penalties on Roth savings held inside a workplace plan....