BeamaLife Blog

Last month the White House decided to get into the business of giving financial advice.  The White House’s “Middle Class Task Force” recommended that Americans, many of whom are in a terrible financial bind, begin investing in immediate annuities. 
With the volatility of the stock market, the crash of the real estate market, and the staggering [...]

If you’re like many Americans, your plans for retirement include not retiring – at least not for a few more years.  Sun Life Financial recently released what it calls its “Unretirement Index,” which found that 65% of working Americans not expect to be working at least one year longer than they had previously planned.  That [...]

There’s no question that for many people, money is tight these days.  And when you’re low on options for increasing your income, your thoughts may turn to that life insurance policy that you’ve been paying on for so many years.  You could sell it in what’s called a “life settlement,” but is that the right [...]

1. American consumers spend more money on average in 2 months than all the consumers in China and India spend in a year (source: Time Magazine). 2/04/08 issue, bullet # 14
2. 54% of American investors do not read financial literature (e.g., newspaper or magazine articles) because they believe the content is “too hard to understand” (source: AARP). [...]

CBO Director Peter Orszag testified before the House of Representatives that Americans have lost $2 trillion in their 401k’s in the last 15 months. Only two weeks after Orszag’s testimony, Congressman George Miller announced that 401k losses had doubled to $4 trillion in just two weeks. That is forty percent of the value of 401k’s [...]

Here are some eye popping statistics from the US Bureau of Labor about retirement savings and how more people are working today to bridge the retirment income gap.
Between 1977 and 2007, employment of US workers 65 and over increased 101%. The number of employed men 65 and over rose 75%, but employment of women 65 [...]

When we think or talk about insurance, we typically relate it with a cost or treat it as an expense. This is true for health insurance, homeowner’s insurance, car insurance, or even term insurance. And most of us try to minimize our expenses, and we should. The common thought process flows as follows: If I [...]

You may have heard a lot about compound interest, but this is probably the first time you are reading about compounding your taxes.  When you reinvest your interest or return in the same investment vehicle; you are now eligible to get interest or return on the additional money.  In this manner, your interest is compounding [...]