How to Make Rain in a Financial Desert — Blog Post

This is an encouraging excerpt on how Doug Andrews talks about how people are using strategies that are protecting themselves in a volatile financial market: We’re heading into late summer…two-plus years into the country’s deepest recession since the Great Depression…and the mild optimism offered a few months ago may be drying up. In a move that recently made headlines, [...]

60 Minutes Feature: 401k Fallout

Did you ever think that your retirement account wouldn’t be there when you needed it most:

FOR RETIREMENT

My own mother is in the exact situation that the people in this 60 minute feature. What you will find when you watch the video below is that the 401k was NEVER meant to be a retirement plan in the first place.

The question is then, why is it that this is ” The American Way” for retirement planning????

Keep Your Future Bright

When times are tough, we all have the same options: 1) make more money to cover our costs, or 2) reduce our spending. What has the government done during these recent hard times? Spent more. Of our money.

While many of the banks that received TARP bailout money are repaying their debts, we’re still headed for a major loss. In fact, the Associated Press recently reported that the Obama “administration is now projecting the losses to the government from the bailout program will be about $120 billion, most of it due to auto and AIG assistance.”

Where do you think it will go to make up for that loss ? You’ve got it. Our money.

This is just one of the many reasons it would behoove all of us to find tax-advantaged ways to save for retirement, so our savings won’t be at risk for even bigger, greedier swipes from Uncle Sam.

Rather than relying on the traditional options for your retirement savings, such as 401(k)s and IRAs (that have proven to be at serious risk for losses during economic crises), you can find safer havens for your money in maximum-funded, tax-advantaged insurance contracts.

With proper structuring, you can leverage your assets – including your idle home equity – and allow your money to grow in MFTA contracts.

And you can enjoy more peace of mind in the future, even when the government starts to take action to make up for the past.

By Doug Andrew

Does Size Really Matter?

“Discovery consists in seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.” – Albert von Szent-Gyorgyi

What you see is not always what you get. That’s why size really doesn’t matter when it comes to retirement income. The video in this post goes into an explanation but let me cover this and add a little more in a quick synopsis:

Many traditional strategies focus on having the biggest “pile” at retirement age and size doesn’t matter when:

* You don’t have access to your funds until retirement age, somewhere around 59, or you are hit with penalties
* Your tax bracket is higher compared to when you were working becasue distribution is taxed as real income and you have far less tax deductions in retirement
* You have a pile that will disappear when you exhaust it and don’t have the ability to “bankroll” itself”
* You think you have enough to pass on something to your heirs….until the “tax man” comes in and takes a majority

So, begin to take a look at the way you structure your retirement in a different way. See what other’s have seen and think what most have not thought. When we “follow the crowd” most of the time it really is just the easiest thing to do or, understand at that. What has happened in our economy in the past few years has made all of us take a step back, so we can now think “outside the box” for solutions to what we all now want:

A Happy, Healthy, Prosperous and Fulfilling Life in Retirement