Tim Will and his wife Eleanor moved to rural North Carolina a few years hoping to pursue a decades-old dream to become organic farmers. Tim had spent his career working for big telecommunications companies as a systems analyst, and more recently had taught history and geography in an urban Miami...

What's more important: a cost-of-living increase in Social Security benefits for retired people, or health insurance subsidies for the unemployed? The answer depends on your clout in Washington.

With the economy still stuck in a ditch, lawmakers are debating extensions to the stimulus legislation passed earlier this year. One provision...

The Social Security Administration has made it official: no cost-of-living increase for seniors in 2010. Federal law calls for an automatic COLA tied to an average of the Consumer Price Index in the third quarter each year, and there's no inflation to speak of in the economy right now. So,...

The Great Recession is pushing older workers to postpone retirement, but will employers accommodate them?

Demographics dictate that the workforce will age in the years ahead. By 2016, one-third of the U.S. workforce will be age 50 or older, compared with 28 percent in 2007, according to AARP.

But the...

Is entrepreneurship really a young person's game? You'd think so reading David Leonhard's column today in The New York Times. In an otherwise interesting piece about the Great Recession's split personality, Leonhardt drops in this comment: "The reasons for the slow churn are obviously complex. The baby boomers are...

It's illegal for employers to discriminate based on age. But age bias is widely acknowledged to be a key factor in job loss and hiring practices -- something that should be painfully obvious to even a casual reader of newspapers, which routinely run articles about laid-off midlife workers.

In 2008,...

Many of the protesters showing up at this month's town hall meetings on health care reform are old enough to be on Medicare--or they're pretty close. They're also old enough to know better; here we have beneficiaries of a gigantic, successful federal health insurance program screaming at their legislators...

When the housing market was soaring, many baby boomers thought of their homes as piggy-banks that could be cracked open in retirement to finance retirement.

High housing prices would allow us to leverage equity to finance our lifestyles, buy second homes or pay entry fees into retirement communities. That thinking...

The Great Recession is about to squeeze retirees where it hurts: the monthly Social Security check.

By law, Social Security passes along an annual cost of living adjustment -- or COLA -- to recipients. The increase is tied to a broad measure of inflation in the economy, and a year...

Here's some bad news for men: We don't live as long as women. But there's bad news for women, too: you might live too long--financially speaking.

Women face a greater longevity risk--the danger of outliving their assets and experiencing poverty in old age. The average life expectancy for a 65-year-old...

Target date funds need to sharpen up their aim.

These funds, which offer a way to put your 401(k) investing on cruise control, are taking a lot of heat due to the large losses suffered by some close-to-retirement investors in the market crash. At a Washington hearing last month, regulators...

Retirement investors under the age of 30 participating in defined contribution plans are seeing their accounts bounce back at a much faster rate than over-55 investors who are near retirement, according to Mercer, the benefits consulting firm.

Mercer analyzed its defined contribution data for participants under 30, and those over...

When Jim Siegfried was an undergraduate in the early 1970s, he wanted to become a teacher. But there was a large surplus of teachers at the time and mentors advised him to consider a career elsewhere.

Siegfried chose a career in business and spent several decades working for large corporations...

A growing number of older Americans are robbing Peter to pay Paul by filing early for Social Security.

New federal government data shows that applications for Social Security benefits are running well ahead of the rate expected due solely to aging of the population. The most likely cause is the...

Is the Great Recession bypassing seniors? That's the conclusion drawn by a new study looking at the downturn's impact on different age groups. But I'm not buying it.

The Pew Research Center poll reports that Americans over age 65 are less likely to have been forced to cut their...

The bankruptcy of Chrysler LLC is requiring painful sacrifice all around, but an especially big cut is being taken by the health care plan that covers the company's retirees.

A health care trust fund established earlier by the big three automakers will become the new majority owner of Chrysler, and...

Three months after President Obama's inauguration, one phrase from his speech on the steps of the Capitol comes back to me often: "The time has come to set aside childish things."

That line, which quotes loosely from 1 Corinthians:13 in the New Testament, refers to our collective need to...

A growing list of employers have reduced their matching contributions to workers' 401(k) accounts as they struggle to preserve cash in the recession. But here's how bad it's become: Even AARP has suspended its 401k match for the rest of 2009.

When the nation's most prominent defender of retirement...

Barbara Parks stumbled onto a way to do well by doing good. Divorced in her early 60s and ready for something new, she drove from her home in Minnesota to resettle in San Francisco, where her two sisters lived.

She expected to look for work in career counseling, the field...