Municipal Bonds
These are debt securities that are created when a state, county or municipal government embarks on a new project like a new school, water treatment plant, or road, and looks for investors to help finance it. Municipal bonds are exempt from federal income taxes and many are issued with exemptions from state and local taxes, meaning that investors keep more of the income generated from the securities.
As featured in Bernews.com.
I think I speak for most people when I say that at some point in our life we put something on our credit card and didn’t pay it off in full, leading to a vicious circle of recurring payments and mounting interest on the balance! Most of us get “stung” once and learn the lesson of how to use a credit card sensibly, but unfortunately some of us don’t learn and we begin to develop an unhealthy relationship with our credit card.
The upside of using auto-enrollment (and auto-escalation) features in a 401(k) plan are considerable. Participants in plans that use auto-enrollment seldom opt out, even when they are enrolled at 6% to 10% of pay. This has resulted in many new participants saving for their futures. Recently, though, a study was done that suggests people who are automatically enrolled in their plan may take on more debt than they would have otherwise.
It isn’t surprising that average contributions are generally lower for younger 401(k) plan participants. Not only is retirement much farther down the road for them than it is for their Generation X and baby boomer colleagues, many of them struggle with more debt and less income. On average, they contribute about 5.3% of pay to their retirement plans, compared to 6.6% for Gen Xers and 8.6% for baby boomers. (more…)
