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Old 03-09-2015, 02:46 AM
 
105,841 posts, read 107,820,907 times
Reputation: 79440

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Quote:
Originally Posted by boogie'smom View Post
have an axe to grind
› to have a strong personal opinion about something that you want people to accept and that is the reason why you do something


I want to apologize to mathjak for saying in an earlier post that I thought he had "an axe to grind" . The definition above is what I had in mind. I understand now that the phrase means different things to different people.

I wish I had better ccp skills. I think the quote above is from Merriam Webster.

Thank you to the person who brought this to my attention.

and I'm not even worried about being off topic
awe shucks ! thanks
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Old 03-09-2015, 03:02 AM
 
105,841 posts, read 107,820,907 times
Reputation: 79440
Quote:
Originally Posted by modhatter View Post
I think the biggest distinguishing categorizes should be:

RETIRED
WORKING TOWARDS RETIREMENT



Sonoid, I wouldn't get too worked up over the situation. Thankfully there are measures put in place to prevent seniors from total lack of care. The hardest part of outliving your money is probably the time spent trying to remain independent. That is when you see seniors like you mention doing everything they can to survive financially. But sometimes seniors wait too long too before asking for help, and that is not good either. If your husband has Alzheimers, iit is just a matter of time before you can no longer care for him, and he will need greater supervision than even you can give him.

That may be a long way off, I don't know, but when ever it is, you will still be able to survive and find happiness. There are senior housing apartments where if you are healthy enouth and can still care for yourself, your rent will be but a small amount of your social security. You will get assistance with food, transportation, and medical costs. Yes that means all monies will have to be spent down and would probably require you to sell your home and rent somewhere until your assets were depleted, or go into an assisted living facility until they were depleted. But you would make friends, and have all the essential needs met, so you should not stress over this.

You do need to prepare though. Look into all your options as there are sometimes long waiting lists and you want to try and time things best you can and always have a plan. Hopefully you have read NoMoreSnowForMe's post about her situation. This should offer you some comfort and reassurances.
i don't really see it as pre or post retirement for a number of reasons since the big distinction in planning is not until after we retire and need to work with what we have .

when it comes time to spend down is when the game changes ,not prior.

except for a bit of tax planning i don't really see the distinctiom between working towards retirement and just the normal accumulation stage where we try to work towards all our financial goals be it a house , college , or saving for retirement.

the methods and planning as far as i see make no distinction nor need one and that fits fine under the regular topics we have in investing or personal finance .

but the decumulation stage when we do retire is where the game changes as many need their portfolio's to generate a life long income .

many retirees go from trying to grow richer during that accumulation stage to trying to not growing poorer in the decumulation stage , not by inflation , or by poor tax planning or poor allocations.


THE LESS WE HAVE TO WORK WITH THE MORE IMPORTANT TO GET IT RIGHT !.

our fair share of taxes is whatever we can legally figure out we have to pay. pay more than your share and those dollars go right out of your hands.


so i don't see it as pre or after i see it as just retirement and your money.

once you retire you have that pile of money and for those left to their own devices they want to know how much can i live on ?

that number has many many ways to be arrived at with various degrees of successfully not having to take a cut in income if 2008 repeats or the high inflation of the 1970's returns.


how to mesh your income from savings , when to take ss , how to work with rmd's , tax structuring etc all become pretty important.

who are you even investing for ? is it your income or do you have a pension , need little from savings and want to invest more for heirs ?


the questions and complexity of good planning takes in alot.

basically the goal is to have your money last , pay as little tax on your fair share , mitigate damage to your assets from events like long term care and basicaly have a plan that once set up requires LITTLE TIME OR FIDDLING.

none of the above has anything to do with pre-retirement . these are all 2nd half of the game actions and would only be of interest to those it apply's to who are retired.

Last edited by mathjak107; 03-09-2015 at 04:31 AM..
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Old 03-09-2015, 03:53 AM
 
105,841 posts, read 107,820,907 times
Reputation: 79440
other areas of discussion that should be centrally located in one retirement money sub forum would be discussions about things like this as well and again it has nothing to do with pre retirement..

i married a widow who had no interest in anything financially . when her husband died she was lost as to what to do , she had no idea how to get an income from her fairly small savings .

so what better person to trust for advice than the broker at her bank . ding ding ding .. alarm alarm.

so he put 1/2 her money in dot com and tech stocks and she got burned big time.

so where am i going with this :

as if we didn't know it , most women are different creatures than men. they think different ,have different needs ,wants and requirements.

any good financial planner will tell you while there are some women who control the investing generally the husband does more often than not.:

but most men are more interested in growing wealth , they care about allocations ,investments , getting the biggest bang for the buck ( no pun intended),beating indexes , etc .

women clients are different as far as what brought them to that planners office and it is nothing like the mans reason. a mans reason is usually facts and figures , a womens reason is she has a story to tell. ( don't they always?) ha ha ha


women have very different concerns and it is usually centered around the fact they have visions of being alone eventually and being the proverbial bag lady under the bridge after they out lived their money.

women want security , I know that because when I approach women in clubs they usually call out security ,security, ha ha ha

women live longer than men , a big point when planning but more important while 80% of all married men die married ,80% of all women die alone.

I think that sentence requires reading a 2nd time as there is a huge difference in situation for a woman.

women usually don't like to take on much volatility,especially a widow who just lost a social security check or someone alone..


if a retired couple and the man is doing the investing he should consider his wife and her ability to carry on without him . meaning at some point a nice simple plan with even a monthly check from an annuity in the mail box for her may be in the cards.

that is something a couple needs to work out between them but how to cater to what i call the wife factor is a discussion ear marked for that kind of sub forum.

most men i see in the investing forums that are retired seem totally blind to the fact their wife has a different need and view of what she wants if the husband passes.

for those couples where the women are in the drivers seat and call the investing shots the reverse may be true.


but anyway i expressed enough why all this stuff is not pre-retirement planning but post retirement planning.

Last edited by mathjak107; 03-09-2015 at 04:35 AM..
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Old 03-09-2015, 04:16 AM
 
4,765 posts, read 3,712,448 times
Reputation: 3038
Quote:
Originally Posted by mathjak107 View Post
this is very true. our LTC plan sponsered by nys tells us out right that while we are paying pick the best home we can find that will eventually accept medicaid and they will likely pay and keep us there .
Ah, I see. I did not know that. So, I assume that they charge a high rate while you can pay, then accept the lower Medicaid amount when you run out?

Last edited by shaker281; 03-09-2015 at 04:27 AM..
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Old 03-09-2015, 04:23 AM
 
105,841 posts, read 107,820,907 times
Reputation: 79440
yep.... that is why they only keep a limited number of beds open for day one medicaid patiants. they want them for the high rollers so to speak that have insurance or their own funds.

my grand father ended up in a medicaid home and had to accept an opening sooooo far away and our family was pretty poor and had no car. it was so hard to even get to see him

with both my grandfather and dad in a nursing home for quite a few years i am taking no chances lol..
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Old 03-09-2015, 07:48 AM
 
31,672 posts, read 40,915,295 times
Reputation: 14418
Quote:
Originally Posted by mathjak107 View Post
yep.... that is why they only keep a limited number of beds open for day one medicaid patiants. they want them for the high rollers so to speak that have insurance or their own funds.

my grand father ended up in a medicaid home and had to accept an opening sooooo far away and our family was pretty poor and had no car. it was so hard to even get to see him

with both my grandfather and dad in a nursing home for quite a few years i am taking no chances lol..
That is why getting in the door is so important. LTC can involve both a short and long term strategy. If a longer term one is not financially possible a medium term one should be. Going for broke from the beginning could end up being a big regret especially in some areas where the floor for care is sub basement. I wouldn't want Medicaid from the beginning in NC or many other states.
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Old 03-09-2015, 11:47 AM
 
Location: SW Florida
14,832 posts, read 11,975,005 times
Reputation: 24604
Quote:
Originally Posted by TuborgP View Post
That is why getting in the door is so important. LTC can involve both a short and long term strategy. If a longer term one is not financially possible a medium term one should be. Going for broke from the beginning could end up being a big regret especially in some areas where the floor for care is sub basement. I wouldn't want Medicaid from the beginning in NC or many other states.

Especially as it looks like in those states someone on Medicaid looking for a nursing home doesn't really have much choice as to where they end up.
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Old 03-09-2015, 03:08 PM
 
2,420 posts, read 4,353,303 times
Reputation: 3528
Thank you mathjak for the financial 101 recap. I am really sorry to hear that woman have different objectives than men. But I don't believe that anyone suggested that there could or would not be any financial threads on such things as "draw down" or helping a widower with questions on his/her finances once their partner dies, or any other change that a retired person could or should consider to help manage what ever money they have been able to save.

RETIRED just means that the retired person is there. There is no place for "should have or could have or poor planning incrimination" Financial discussion should be centered only on the best way to handle whatever you have once you arrived.

Typically, we hear a lot from from people in their 50's (Pre-Retirees) who suddenly become more aware of the tick tock clock before them who maybe become concerned later in the game than they should, or just didn't have sufficient funds to accumulate enough for a secure retirement because of lower wage jobs, divorce, single moms (or dads), loss of job, etc.

In reality, I doubt that we could keep certain posters from the "shoulda, coulda" comments along with incriminating remarks, as much as would like to see them stop. But there is certainly no place for it for the people who have already arrived at retirement.

Maybe, the answer is a more active moderator participation is this department, and the moderator just removing those remarks from the posts. Not necessarily the post itself as there may contain other useful information in it, just the inappropriate remarks. That might help keep people a little more aware of their remarks and their effects on posters and think twice before they post such responses.

Call me crazy, but judging from the Retiring on a Literal Shoestring thread that survived for six years with 3,598 posts, which dealt with limited retirement income issues, would lead me to believe there is a large audience out there who would like to feel at home in discussing their financial concerns in Retirement, who may not have the resources to benefit from all of Mathjak's fine financial strategies.


Quote:
Originally Posted by mathjak107 View Post
i don't really see it as pre or post retirement for a number of reasons since the big distinction in planning is not until after we retire and need to work with what we have .

when it comes time to spend down is when the game changes ,not prior.

except for a bit of tax planning i don't really see the distinctiom between working towards retirement and just the normal accumulation stage where we try to work towards all our financial goals be it a house , college , or saving for retirement.

the methods and planning as far as i see make no distinction nor need one and that fits fine under the regular topics we have in investing or personal finance .

but the decumulation stage when we do retire is where the game changes as many need their portfolio's to generate a life long income .

many retirees go from trying to grow richer during that accumulation stage to trying to not growing poorer in the decumulation stage , not by inflation , or by poor tax planning or poor allocations.


THE LESS WE HAVE TO WORK WITH THE MORE IMPORTANT TO GET IT RIGHT !.

our fair share of taxes is whatever we can legally figure out we have to pay. pay more than your share and those dollars go right out of your hands.


so i don't see it as pre or after i see it as just retirement and your money.

once you retire you have that pile of money and for those left to their own devices they want to know how much can i live on ?

that number has many many ways to be arrived at with various degrees of successfully not having to take a cut in income if 2008 repeats or the high inflation of the 1970's returns.


how to mesh your income from savings , when to take ss , how to work with rmd's , tax structuring etc all become pretty important.

who are you even investing for ? is it your income or do you have a pension , need little from savings and want to invest more for heirs ?


the questions and complexity of good planning takes in alot.

basically the goal is to have your money last , pay as little tax on your fair share , mitigate damage to your assets from events like long term care and basicaly have a plan that once set up requires LITTLE TIME OR FIDDLING.

none of the above has anything to do with pre-retirement . these are all 2nd half of the game actions and would only be of interest to those it apply's to who are retired.
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Old 03-09-2015, 03:10 PM
 
105,841 posts, read 107,820,907 times
Reputation: 79440
All valid points. We are trying to get a sub forum for those discussions and hopefully it will be approved.
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Old 03-09-2015, 03:33 PM
 
30,860 posts, read 36,775,907 times
Reputation: 34399
Quote:
Originally Posted by Three Wolves In Snow View Post
This is the kind of post that makes those of us who are not anywhere near retirement age, but are looking for what to do, NOT want to ask any questions. With this type of attitude, it turns people away, it does NOT make people come forward to ask: "So, what do you suggest that I do to (fill in the blank)?"

If you think you know all there is to know, try a different approach. Lambasting people makes those of us seeking information who see that feel like we are approaching a rabid dog.

If people are so "POSITIVELY FRUSTRATED" and have "WHEEDLED AND CAJOLED UNTIL" they are "BLUE IN THE FACE", maybe they need to take a step back, go take a nap, and try again when they aren't so worked up. There's plenty of people who are genuinely seeking answers. Trashing on them is not how you get anyone to listen.
I'm not talking about people on CD. I am talking about people in my own life. Stuff I've been saying for years, sometimes decades. When do I ever lambaste people on CD for asking for advice?

But I do indeed have issues with people who have magical thinking and who act like living for today is the only thing that matters. And I don't apologize for giving those folks a hard time. Life is going to give most of those folks a much harder time than anything I can say on CD.
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