November « 2009 « Altfest Personal Wealth Management

No COLA in 2010

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

By Alan Ng

Earlier this year, a prudent client of ours and I discussed the speculations that Social Security beneficiaries will not be receiving COLA increases this year. Recently the Social Security Administration confirmed those speculations and announced that there will not be any COLA increases for 2010 for the first time since 1975.

Before I delve further into this topic, I’ll briefly touch on what a COLA is. Each year, the Social Security Administration calculates the annual change in cost of living from the end of the third quarter of last year to the end of the third quarter this year; hence the term COLA – Cost of Living Adjustment. Those who receive Social Security payments get a raise in their payment by the COLA amount. This year, the estimate was that cost of living has fallen by 2.1%.

As you can imagine, no COLA increases may put a damper on the moods of those reliant on these payment checks, especially when investment assets took a large hit last year. However, if one were to be more optimistic, Social Security beneficiaries could be happy to know that the 2009 COLA increase of 5.8% was the largest increase for 25 years despite the fact that our economy went into recession thereafter. Additionally, by law, even though benefits are not increased in 2010, they cannot be decreased either even if cost of living goes down.

Living It Up for Less at Lincoln Center

Monday, November 16th, 2009

By Nancy Mandell, guest blogger

An art director I once worked with for a period of about year took regular vacation days during opera season, but never left town. His destination was backstage at the Metropolitan Opera House in Lincoln Center, where he served as a non-singing extra in every production that needed him. Not only was he part of the exciting costume and makeup process, he also got to see productions of every opera all season long. For George, this was heaven!

If opera has always been your idea of heaven, but one you feel may have to wait in the wings on a retiree’s entertainment budget, you may be as happily surprised as I was with a recent email from the Met. The message was a “reminder” of something I’d never actually known:

For the 2009-2010 season, The Metropolitan Opera is continuing its tradition of offering free tickets to final dress rehearsals for selected productions. This is, in fact, the fourth season that the Met has offered this program, which gives away 3,000 tickets—at a limit of two per person—to opera lovers who show up at the box office at a specific time on a specific day. Now even this process has gone digital.

Funding the Education of a Loved One

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

By By Paul Palazzo, CFP®, COA

With tough times come tough decisions. For some, then, the decision of whether to pay for private educations for their children or grandchildren is more difficult than it was a couple of years ago, before the financial markets, home values and salaries went down, and unemployment went up. For many, it was never an easy decision.

Private education can be dauntingly expensive, particularly in New York City, where some top schools are now charging well over $30,000 a year for K-12. Add in the estimated $30,000-per- year premium that elite private universities get above and beyond state schools, and you can see that we’re talking real money here, even for professional couples who are great savers.

For perspective, if you invested those payments – $30,000-plus for 12 years and $30,000 for four – at a reasonable real return (after inflation) of 4 percent, you could wind up with close to three quarters of a million in today’s dollars.

A Woman’s Work…

Monday, November 9th, 2009

By Nancy Mandell, guest blogger

Nancy Mandell If you’re a woman, you probably know most of this already: No matter where in the world they live, women are overworked, over-extended, over-stressed and—despite currently controlling some $12 trillion in global spending—under-served by businesses.

Lest we be accused of whining, however, it helps to see the facts in writing. So let’s thank the Boston Consulting Group, which recently released findings from a 120-question survey of more than 12,000 women in 22 countries—talk about stats! The survey was initiated in conjunction with a book co-authored by Michael J. Silverstein, a senior partner and executive committee member at BCG. The title of the book - published in September by Harper Business - deserves a sentence of its own: Women Want More: How to Capture Your Share of the World’s Fastest-Growing Market. It’s a bit opportunistic, but then we have to remember that consulting groups are usually paid by businesses to improve the bottom line - in this case by the additional $5 trillion women are expected to earn over the next five years.

No wonder we’re over-stressed! We have that burden of expectations while spending over 70 percent of consumer dollars worldwide! In order to survive the current global recession, one billion of us are in the workforce - many of us not by “choice,” says Silverstein, but because “they must work for their families to have success. And as women earn more, he adds, the balance of power shifts, “and their incremental earnings become critical for affluence.”

On top of that, when we get home from our high-paying, high-powered jobs, 88 percent of us say they do the grocery shopping, 85 percent prepare meals, and 84 percent of us are still doing the laundry. Read More…

Tags: Julie and Julia, Nancy Mandell, women
Posted in Retiring Well in New York: The Altfest Blog Finance and Lifestyle, Women | No Comments »

City Life on a Senior Budget

Friday, November 6th, 2009

By Nancy Mandell, guest blogger

Nancy Mandell Can you afford to live in the City after you retire? For a growing number of New Yorkers—and even some retirees from the outlying boroughs and suburbs—the question has become: “How can we afford to live anywhere else?”

Of course, if your ideal retirement requires a golf course, an in-ground pool and a hammock under a shade tree, read no further. But if the thought of living three hours or 3,000 miles from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Opera and the MTA leaves you hyperventilating, don’t panic. You’re not alone. In addition to hundreds of free or inexpensive entertainment and educational options available to seniors, are numerous on- and off-line guides (like Retire in New York City—Even If You’re Not Rich, by Janet Hays [Bonus Books]) to point you in the right direction.

According to the intrepid list makers at Forbes Magazine, New York City ranked #22 in the world, but was still the most expensive place to live in America last year. Read More…

Tags: Nancy Mandell, New York, retirement
Posted in Retiring Well in New York: The Altfest Blog Finance and Lifestyle, Smart Spending | 1 Comment »

Past Events for Women

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

Women’s Financial $pa – The Key to Investor Success: Behavioral Finance and Women’s Habits
Speaker: Gayle Buff, CFP®, CFA

Professional Women’s Roundtable: Exploring Issues and Challenges Facing Today’s Mature Woman
Host: Karen C. Altfest

Women’s Financial Salon – Women and Longevity
Speaker: Dr. Ronald Caplan, author of Long Life: Prolonging the Productive, Fulfilling Lives of Women

Women’s Financial Salon – Travel Workshop
Speaker: Phyllis Furman, founder of the Women’s Travel Club

Women’s Financial Salon – Protecting Yourself from Fraud
Speaker: Susan L. Pickman, Ph.D., Certified Fraud Examiner

Women’s Financial Salon – Women & Money: From Stress to Success
Speakers: Judith Pfeffer, Ph.D., NCSP and Karen C. Altfest, Ph.D., CFP®

Women’s Financial $pa – Remember the Ladies: The 2008 Elections and What They Mean for You
Speaker: Karen C. Altfest, Ph.D., CFP®; as well as a Q&A period with Altfest professionals Ekta Patel, MBA; Dawn Brown, CFP®; and Nandini Wamorkar, MBA, CFP®

Women’s Financial $pa – The Art of Negotiation
Speaker: John M. Darley, Ph.D., Warren Professor of Psychology at Princeton University

Women’s Financial $pa – Taking Care of Your Loved Ones and Taking Care of Your Life
Speakers: Judith Grimaldi, Esq and Karen C. Altfest, Ph.D., CFP®

Women’s Financial $pa – Charitable Giving
Panel discussion moderated by Karen C. Altfest, Ph.D., CFP®, with speakers Jacqueline Valouch, Vice President of Fidelity Charitable Services;
Abby Tucker, Vice President of Marketing and Donor Relations - Jewish Communal Fund;
Dr. Frances Degan Horowitz, President Emerita - Graduate Center of City University of New York

Posted in Past Events for Women | 1 Comment »

Welcome to the Altfest Blog: Retiring Well in New York and Other Ideas to Think About

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

By Andrew G. Altfest

As our clients reading this know, Altfest Personal Wealth Management is a pretty traditional firm. For years we’ve mailed newsletters to our clients to advise them on personal finance issues like how to decide whether to convert from a Traditional IRA to a Roth IRA.

But times are changing, and blogs are a part of that. So when Karen, Lew, Anthony Reinhart and I got together to talk about what we wanted to blog about our first step was to take a look at what else was out there (the first time most of us had ever been to blogs)and saw that financial blogs typically fall into two categories:

* Blogs by individuals who share tips on things like the best rewards credit cards
* Blogs by traders and technical investors that tout new investment ideas and strategies

One similarity that these blogs have in common is that many of them have outrageous names, like “Fiscal Geek” and “Krazy Coupon Lady.” But they don’t seem to speak to the people we speak to every day at our firm.

At the Altfest blog, we simply want to share our expertise and offer our opinions on different personal finance topics and investment strategies that we feel will be important to the people we work with. So, for example, we set out to write about Retiring Well in the New York City Area, with the aim of education and giving people the ammunition needed to make intelligent decisions. Our writings will span the personal finance spectrum, from evaluating investment ideas to deciding whether to refinance. We come across many, many ideas in our daily work, both in print and through discussions, and we’ve decided to regularly share our thoughts on these ideas with you.

Just as the blog idea pretty much fell into our lap, another opportunity came along when Nancy Mandell—someone we respect and knew as a journalist and editor for Wealth Manager magazine, an industry trade publication—told us she was moving to freelance writing. After a conversation we saw Nancy as a perfect guest blogger. It quickly became clear that her experiences could help us explore the lifestyle side of Retiring Well in New York—as well as some other topics—while we at Altfest contribute more of the financial side.

We see this blog as an additional feature for the Altfest family of clients, hope you enjoy our new blog and invite you to participate by sharing your experiences and comments on any of our blog subjects.

Tags: Andrew Altfest, introduction, personal finance
Posted in Retiring Well in New York: The Altfest Blog Finance and Lifestyle | 9 Comments »

Archive for November, 2009

Living It Up for Less at Lincoln Center

Funding the Education of a Loved One

A Woman’s Work…

City Life on a Senior Budget

By Nancy Mandell, guest blogger

Past Events for Women

Welcome to the Altfest Blog: Retiring Well in New York and Other Ideas to Think About

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