When you have retired, your goal is to expire before your bank account does. The easiest way, of course, is to take up juggling hatchets.
A more moderate solution, however, is to try and figure out how much you can withdraw each year – a tricky calculation at best, since you know neither what you’ll earn in any given year, nor what the rate of inflation will be, nor how long you’ll live.
It was like watching a game of telephone where one child speaks into another child’s ear and that child speaks into another child’s ear and, by the time the last child repeats the original statement, it has transformed into something completely different.
If anyone doubted the power of Twitter, their skepticism was laid to rest this week. Early Tuesday afternoon, a tweet from the Associated Press reported President Obama had been injured by explosions in the White House. Stock, bond, and commodity markets fell sharply on the news and then rebounded when the Associated Press communicated that its Twitter account had been hacked. This wasn’t the first time such a thing had happened on Twitter or the first time false and market moving information had been posted. In February, the stocks of Burger King and Jeep moved after a post on each company’s Twitter account indicated the company had been sold to a rival firm. The lesson to take from these events? Everyone may want to be wary about buying or selling investments based on news reported through Twitter or any other social media feeds.
