• financialengines.com - analyzes your current contributions
• gethuman.com - find a real person at any company
• irahelp.com - more about 2010 tax deal

A lot of baby boomers are trying to figure out how to spend their money now that they are settling into retirement. It can be frustrating, but it’s also a good problem to have. Some folks have used low cost, self-service companies for years, and now they don’t know what to do next. In the next few years, there will be half a trillion dollars moving from the working world into retirement. No-commission houses are now trying to figure out how to serve people who’ve always done self serve investing. Well, Vanguard is opening a limited-service and a full-service window. They’ll come up with a plan for you, depending on how much help you want. Fidelity is doing something similar. The company has a program that analyzes every single account you have on a continual basis. The analysis tells you how much you have to spend and from which accounts you should pull it. These programs are designed to keep people loyal to them and bring new folks in. In addition, eTrade has come out with a product called “Risk analyzer.” It’s allows people to meet their goals and possibly quit working early to retire.

Clark has gotten a lot of negative feedback recently regarding his belief that the marketplace should decide what things cost. He’s said it about cars, clothes and even concert tickets. But people somehow think it’s unpatriotic to let goods from other countries into our own and to buy them. Well, Clark stands by his opinion. People in these countries make better products than we do in the States, and it allows them to have jobs and earn a living when they couldn’t before. Free trade is a positive thing, yet people take only a negative approach to it. A report by Canadian researchers shows that 70 percent of the jobs that will exist in the U.S. and Canada in 2020 do not exist today. Those are new jobs being created and people have no idea they will hold them. Capitalist economies go through constant change. That’s the nature of the game and companies simply need to adjust and adapt.

Nasty news came out recently about inflation at the consumer level, and it has people concerned. Inflation has knocked about 5 percent off our paychecks in the past year meaning that you’re getting about 95 cents when you got $1 last year. Politicians will, of course, try to blame it on the price of gas. But that is simply not true. Inflation has gone up, and looking back over the year it’s really affected us. So how do we work around that? Well, you raise interest rates and make it tougher for people to spend money. The Feds have to figure out how to weaken demand without throwing us into a recession. And that is really hard to do. So, we’ll see what happens. In the meantime, your main goal should be to pay down debt. Debt is going to be more costly as interest rates move up. So, the more you pay it down, the less you’ll suffer. You must get ahead of the curve on this one. You can’t control what happens on Wall Street, but you can control what happens within the four walls of your home.

A proposed tax law about to go into effect has both some positives and negatives Clark wants to tell you about. First of all, there is a new gift for 2010 that could be potentially great for you. If you have money in an IRA or 401k from an old job, you can now convert that to a Roth. You will pay the tax bill over 2011 and 2012 and then it grows tax free. That means that if someone has a $50,000 converted IRA and they give it as an inheritance, it will have an ultimate value of $41 million. That’s $41 million TAX FREE! Why would Congress do this? It’s all in an effort to make the budgets appear like they’re giving people a break now. People will make up for it in 2011 and 2012, when they pay tax. But it’s still a great deal for consumers. You will want to discuss with your accountant whether you should do a non-deductible IRA. In addition, there is a “kid tax,” a punitive tax that affects children who have inherited money. It used to affect kids up to age 15, but it’s been raised to 18. It basically punishes kids who have jobs. If they save too much on what they earn, they will be subject to the kiddy tax. There are ways to get around it, but talk to your accountant. One way is to transfer money from that account to a 529 plan. Read more on the bill here.

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Remember cassette tapes that you used to play in your car tape player or the VCR tapes you’d play in your VCR machine. It was perfectly label to make copies or songs or movies and watch them on these formats. But the music label companies want to change history. They have filed suit against XM satellite, which has a device people can store songs on after hearing them on their satellite system. To Clark, this is ridiculous. The law states that people can copy music for personal use as long as they’ve paid for it. Sirius Radio has a similar device, but that company caved to the labels and pays them a kickback when people subscribe. The four labels are Universal, Sony-BMG, Warner and EMI. Those companies control the entire music business and they are trying to take away your music and your rights.