We journalists got a gentle chiding today from Stephen Goss, chief actuary of the Social Security Administration. If you’re going to talk about a problem, it’s important to define it correctly, and we seem to spend a lot of time…

A discussion of children’s issues was about the last thing we expected at a retirement seminar. But Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, says America can’t address the concerns of the older generation without affecting the youngest generation, too:

It’s children who…

When your 401k account has taken a beating, the size of your Social Security benefit is a key determinant of your standard of living. But, according to a story in the Los Angeles Times, a lot of Americans are voluntarily cutting the…

The Social Security trustees’ latest report moves up the system’s insolvency date by four years, to 2037. Medicare’s hospital fund runs out of money in 2017, two years sooner than expected. What’s more, the hospital fund is already paying out…

Did you know that you could get a free loan from Social Security? I didn’t, but this is a strategy worth tucking away and considering at retirement time. Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research says that the government pension program is…

Amid the many financial and budget worries we have as a nation, Social Security always seemed like a distant concern. It’s projected to be solvent until sometime after 2040, and was projected to be a net positive for the federal budget – bringing…

Michael Astrue, the nation’s Social Security commissioner, says he’s optimistic about the possibility of reforms that will improve the pension system’s solvency. Speaking Monday morning to backers of Washington University’s Weidenbaum Center, Astrue  predicted that Congress will be ready to tackle…

If one spends much time reading and thinking about retirement-savings plans, as I did while writing today’s column on the problems with the 401k system, one conclusion is inevitable: There are no easy answers.

Alicia Munnell, director of Boston College’s Center for…

The Social Security trustees estimate the retirement system’s long-run deficit at $13.6 trillion, which seems bad enough to most people. But economists Alexander Blocker, Laurence Kotlikoff and Stephen A. Ross have taken a close look at the trustees’ calculations, and they say Social Security has…

Much of the retirement debate has focused on shoring up Social Security, saving the traditional pension plan and getting more workers to open Individual Retirement Accounts.  Those all are important discussions, but both a new book and a McKinsey study point…