Every week I find a few great articles I feel are especially valuable. Following are this week’s best. I hope you find them as useful as I did.
This week’s favorites include a new study showing how much exercise we really need, the FIRE community’s greatest flaw, when it’s better to choose Roth accounts, why you will never run out of money, and are you better off with tax free bonds.
Happy reading!
Physicians are constantly telling their patients to get more exercise, and physicians should follow suit. But how much is enough? Is there such a thing as too much? Medscape published comments on a new study recently published in the journal Circulation that shows Exceeding Previous Exercise Guidelines Boost Survival. If you have been using the old guidelines for estimating the amount of exercise we all need, time for an update. My 40 mile bike rides three times a week meet the new guidelines.
Obsessing over “The Number” needed to be saved before we can retire has taken over the financial blogosphere. Is it 25x our annual spending, or is it 33x, or something else? Money Flamingo has something to say about this trend with an article on The FIRE Community’s Greatest Flaw. I think this article is right on the money about this unhealthy obsession with a number. Are you obsessed with reaching a particular number? What happens when you hit it?
We all agonize over which retirement plan to use, Roth or non-Roth. If Shakespeare were to write about this he would have said “To Roth or not to Roth? That is the question.” If you have been wondering about this yourself, Can I Retire Yet has just what you need in their article When Are Roth Accounts Better then Tax-Deferred? I wrote an article about why I have never used any Roth products and likely never will. But each of our situations is different. Which is best for you?
Before I retired I worried about whether I had enough saved to last the rest of our lives. Everyone seems to have this same worry. Since we hope there will be many years between our retirement and our death, we don’t want to fall short of funds. It turns out I had more than enough and my worries were for naught. Mr. Money Mustache shares with us some of the reasons we should not worry about this issue with Why You’ll Probably Never Run Out Of Money. If you think you have enough, you likely have more than enough.
For those of us in high tax brackets, we have an extra option to where we can put our savings: tax free bonds. But how do we know when to pick the tax free option over a common bond or certificate of deposit? My Money Blog helps out with a nice article on Treasury Bond vs. Bank CD Rates: Adjusting for State and Local Income Taxes. It should not be hard to figure out which will work best in your state at your tax rate.
I hope you enjoy these articles as much as I did. I look forward to updating you again next week with a few more articles I find especially interesting. If you read an especially good article, send me the link so I can share it with others.
