Updated Jan. 19, 2015 11:01 p.m. ET Planning for retirement?
Look no further than your tablet or smartphone. A growing array of apps and websites make it easier to complete many of the most basic—and most important—tasks, from saving money and creating legal documents to figuring out a second career and where to live. There are tools for people nearing or in retirement, and for people just starting to think about it. There are apps that help couples set up budgets and stick to them, websites that rebalance 401(k) allocations, and calculators that offer a better-than-educated guess as to how long that nest egg is going to have to last. Some financial programs take care of chores that are crucial for getting ready for retirement but that many financial advisers often don’t have the time or inclination to do for their clients, such as regularly sweeping cash into accounts that earn higher-than-average interest, or tracking monthly spending. There also are tools for assisting with health care, as well as help with some difficult issues that people often have trouble navigating, such as the legal, health and practical considerations involved in end-of-life planning. A few caveats: Some of the financial websites require consumers to enter the usernames and passwords of their investment and bank accounts. Look for sites that use TRUSTe, Norton Secured Seal, or SOC 3, which verify that companies have adequate cybersecurity and privacy procedures, says Brian Costello, a vice president of information security at Yodlee Inc., which sells technology that many sites use to import data from users’ accounts. Be aware, too, that many free programs make money by recommending products. What follows are free or mostly low-cost programs that can help individuals and families better prepare for and get more enjoyment out of retirement. What Will You Do in Retirement? As baby boomers near the end of their careers, more Web services are helping them think about how they want to spend their time in retirement. Our favorite: LifePlanningForYou.com, which offers a free series of introspective exercises. The site also provides links to financial planners trained in “life planning,” which focuses on helping clients clarify their goals, values and priorities before planning their finances. (It receives no compensation for the referrals, says George Kinder, founder of the Kinder Institute of Life Planning, which developed the website and trains financial advisers in life planning.) One exercise asks three questions: What would you do if you had all the time and money in the world? How would you live if you knew you had only five to 10 years left? And what would you most regret if you died tomorrow? The goal: “To lead people to a deeper and deeper understanding of what’s most important to them,” says Mr. Kinder. The site pushes users to come up with concrete goals they can achieve within weeks. For example, someone who dreams of moving to Vermont might pledge to research towns and discuss telecommuting with an employer, says Mr. Kinder. An alternative: LifeReimagined.org, an AARP website that offers free online tutorials on topics including setting goals and career planning. Developed by experts including author and executive coach Richard Leider, the program includes free 90-minute “checkups” for as many as 25 participants in locations nationwide. AARP is developing longer workshops and in 2015 plans to offer one-on-one online sessions with coaches for about $125 an hour. Longevity Forecasting People often underestimate how long they are going to live, which can cause them to overestimate how much they can spend each year in retirement. For many, the mistake lies in overlooking advances in health care that improve their odds of living longer than their parents did. For an estimate that incorporates health, habits, socioeconomic status and family history, there are life-expectancy calculators such as livingto100.com and How Long Will I Live? The latter was developed by professors at the University of Pennsylvania. Our favorite is from Blue Zones, a company that studies regions with exceptional longevity and advises companies and communities on ways to improve the health of their employees and inhabitants. (Search for “Vitality Compass” in the “Live-Longer” section at Bluezones.com.) In addition to life expectancy, the calculator can forecast healthy-life expectancy, defined as the age someone will reach before being diagnosed with heart disease, diabetes or cancer. As a result, it can provide insight into the number of years a person might pay higher health-care or long-term-care expenses. It also offers tips for living longer. Developed with the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, the calculator is powered by an algorithm that takes into account 29 factors that 314 academic studies have linked to life expectancy, says Nick Buettner, Blue Zones’ community and corporate program director. How Much to Save Even with a realistic estimate of life expectancy, it’s virtually impossible to figure out how much to save for retirement or how long a nest egg might last without first knowing how much you’re spending and on what. Several programs, including Mint and Yodlee’s MoneyCenter, can put together a budget for consumers based on their past spending patterns and alert them when they are in danger of exceeding past thresholds. The services automatically import data from credit cards, loans, and bank, brokerage and 401(k) accounts. If a customer puts all of his or her purchases on credit and debit cards, the services can break down the spending into categories, such as utilities and groceries, and can even track amounts of spending at specific stores or on specific items. A growing number of these sites also function as retirement calculators. Mint can project people’s retirement income based on what they have saved and what it figures they will save, given their habits. The service is free but earns a referral fee when users buy products and services, such as bank accounts and credit cards, from advertisers. Starting later this year, rival HelloWallet plans to offer the same basic service—and allow users to model what will happen if they work longer or put more into a traditional or Roth 401(k) or individual retirement account or a health-savings account. The service is available free through some employers, or for $100 a year. Many services also try to help consumers save more money. HelloWallet computes a financial wellness score for each user, offers a comparison with scores of peers, and recommends ways to improve the score. Retirement Income Planning When planning retirement, saving money is half the battle. The other half: figuring out how to generate a steady paycheck throughout retirement. A growing number of online tools can help. They include robust financial-planning software programs available from companies including Fidelity Investments and Morningstar Inc. that recommend what to invest in and withdrawal strategies. (Morningstar’s service, Retirement Manager, is available through some employer-sponsored defined-contribution plans.) Because each has pros and cons and is programmed with different assumptions, it’s ideal to try more than one, says Anna Rappaport, chairperson of the Society of Actuaries committee on postretirement needs and risks. Some recommend a specific approach to investing. For example, Fidelity’s Income Strategy Evaluator, available free, often recommends annuities for those unable to cover basic living expenses with guaranteed sources of retirement income, including Social Security and a pension. (Fidelity sells its own annuities, as well as offerings from companies including MetLife Inc. and New York Life Insurance Co.) Our favorite income-planning tools—ESPlanner from Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff, and Retiree Income from Baylor University Prof. William Reichenstein and co-founder Bill Meyer—combine income and tax planning, an area that not all such tools address. These services aren’t free. Three phone sessions with a Retiree Income adviser cost from $500 to $2,500. (The greater your assets, the higher the fee.) Retiree Income plans to introduce a do-it-yourself version on its website starting at about $20 a month in early 2015. ESPlanner starts at $149 for the first year plus $50-a-year updates. It offers guidance from an adviser on the phone for $150 an hour. For $500, an adviser will run the program. “Our research has shown that an optimal Social Security strategy, combined with tax-efficient withdrawals, can extend the life of a portfolio by as much as 10 years or longer,” says Prof. Reichenstein. One caveat: The recommendations sometimes call for deferring Social Security to maximize those benefits and reap tax savings. Social Security Planning Not everyone depends on Social Security benefits to cover essential living expenses, but no one should pass up the opportunity to maximize those benefits if they can. The tricky part is knowing when is the best time for each individual to start collecting. A growing number of online programs aim to help users peg the optimal claiming strategy. For couples, the claiming decision can be especially complicated because of the availability of spousal benefits and the need to consider the financial security of the survivor. Because benefits will rise by 6% to 8% for every year you delay claiming between the ages of 62 and 70, those who claim early may reduce the lifetime benefits they (and their surviving spouses) stand to receive by “tens of thousands of dollars,” says Christopher Jones, chief investment officer at Financial Engines Inc., which offers a free calculator. Our top pick? SocialSecuritySolutions.com, which charges from $20 to $250 (depending on the level of advice). This user-friendly site takes into account a wide variety of household configurations as well as the impact that many other sources of retirement income can have on Social Security benefits. Medical Care From quick consultations to second opinions, more Web-based companies offer virtual medical visits via text messages, email, phone and video. Most services, including Teladoc and MDLive, are mainly for routine conditions, such as rashes, sports injuries and the flu. At Doctor on Demand Inc., patients who answer questions about their medical histories are typically connected with a primary-care doctor within two minutes, says Chief Executive Adam Jackson. The site’s 1,400 physicians can write prescriptions. The cost, which some insurers will cover, is $40 per visit. For more serious conditions, Grand Rounds Inc. offers second opinions. The site has contracts with more than 1,000 specialists affiliated with facilities including Harvard Medical School. Mainly offered by employers, it is free to those who get it as an employee benefit. Otherwise, it costs $7,500 per medical case—and insurance generally doesn’t pick up the tab. That means if a patient contracts with the service in connection with a hip replacement, and gets cancer the next day, he or she would have to pay another $7,500 for help with that condition. The service is intended “for complex cases where outcomes are going to be dramatically different based on expertise,” says Owen Tripp, chief executive of Grand Rounds. The service can give referrals to local doctors and book appointments. Aside from providing second opinions, the specialists help plan care and answer follow-up questions, he says. Caregiving Worried about mom or dad’s spending? New Web tools can give caregivers almost real-time oversight. One free app, BillGuard, sends a person’s debit- and credit-card charges to a mobile inbox, where that person—or a designated caregiver—can monitor the transactions. There is typically a one-day lag between the transactions and the time when they appear in the inbox. A caregiver keeping close tabs can use that information to cancel transactions or request refunds, says Yaron Samid, founder and chief executive. BillGuard also sends alerts about purchases from specific merchants that its algorithms and one million users have identified as scams. For more control, True Link Financial Inc. offers a service with a prepaid debit card for $10 a month through which caregivers can monitor charges and block spending at specific merchants or charities, or on whole categories—sweepstakes, for example. Estate Planning A handful of sites offer a blueprint for estate planning, including a list of the documents that are generally needed in addition to a will. One of the most comprehensive, Everplans.com, explains how to complete documents such as health-care proxies and powers of attorney that appoint people to make medical and financial decisions on behalf of someone who becomes incapacitated. It has links to standard versions of these documents for all 50 states plus the District of Columbia and discusses living wills, do-not-resuscitate orders and some types of trusts. The site also sends emails to urge users to take specific steps, such as uploading or completing documents. For $75 a year, users receive five gigabytes of storage for documents on the site. Users frequently upload copies of items their beneficiaries will need, including insurance policies, Social Security cards, bank account numbers, online usernames and passwords, and contracts with funeral homes and cemeteries. Some users even include explanations of their wills, says Abby Schneiderman, the site’s co-founder. The site requires users to name deputies to receive access to the information. It also recommends companies that provide wills and life insurance, although it currently receives no payment from those companies, says Ms. Schneiderman. Similar websites include Principled Heart. End-of-Life Care Making decisions in advance about what health care to receive at life’s end can be difficult. But people who don’t address the issue can leave loved ones guessing at critical times. Moreover, “when these discussions take place in a crisis, conflict can emerge, including sibling rivalry,” says Harriet Warshaw, executive director of the nonprofit Conversation Project, one of a handful of initiatives dedicated to making it easier to talk about the topic. Co-founded in 2010 by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ellen Goodman, the Conversation Project offers a free “Conversation Starter Kit” that poses questions including: How much information do you want your doctor to share with your family? And are there important milestones you want to reach? There’s also advice on talking with doctors about these issues. While 90% of Americans say it’s important to discuss end-of-life medical care, only 27% actually have the talk, says Ms. Warshaw. “Nobody wants to have these conversations, which is why people do not have more control over the way they live at the end of their lives. “We want to give people the courage and confidence to broach the subject.” Miscellaneous Sick of earning next to nothing in interest? Once a month, MaxMyInterest.com will automatically sweep cash from a checking account at one of five brick-and-mortar banks into one or more FDIC-insured savings accounts at online banks with above-average interest rates. Currently, those banks pay between 0.75% and 1.05%, versus the 0.09% national average for money-market and savings accounts. Max’s annual fee: 0.08% of total assets in the online bank accounts. The brick-and-mortar banks are Bank of America Corp., J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc.’s Citibank, Wells Fargo & Co. and First Republic Bank. Another good way to save more is to pay less in fees. According to Vanguard Group, over a 40-year career, someone who invests 9% a year of a salary that starts at $30,000 into a balanced fund and pays 0.25% a year in fees will save 20% more than a person who pays 1.25% in fees. FeeX.com can help. The free site shows how much in dollars a user is paying in fees each month, and projects the cumulative lifetime cost of those fees. It identifies fees paid to financial advisers, brokerage firms, 401(k) plans, and mutual funds, and suggests similar, but lower-cost, funds. For 401(k) advice, check out blooom.com (with three O’s). For $1 to $15 a month, blooom.com’s algorithm picks what funds to invest in from a customer’s 401(k) plan menu—and makes the trades for them. And every three months, the service rebalances the portfolio to a target mix of stocks and bonds that becomes more conservative over time, says CEO Chris Costello. One caveat: With a recommended 80% allocation to stocks for someone 10 years from retirement, the service is for those comfortable with equities. Ms. Tergesen is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal in New York. She can be reached at encore@wsj.com.
The Unbearable Lightness of Tweeting - The Atlantic
At the heart of the media's chattiest technology is a hollow sharing economy. A personal investigation into just how little traffic Twitter's maelstrom actually contributes to websites. Dado Ruvic/Reuters In January, I deleted Twitter from my phone. The app was a charming distraction, I decided, and 2015 would be a year of productivity upgrades. Three weeks later, I cheated by opening Twitter on my iPhone browser. Four weeks later, I was refreshing the same page every other hour. Five weeks later, my productivity experiment in tatters, I re-downloaded the app. This is when I noticed a new feature: View Tweet Activity. It is an engagement "dashboard"—that is, numbers with pictures—that tells you how many times your tweet appeared on users' glassy screens, how many times they clicked it, and how many times they shared it. These are the metrics that journalists and marketers crave, because they can illustrate corporate PowerPoints and answer valuable quantitative questions (e.g. What phrases best correlate with Twitter engagement for our brand?). But the numbers also get at the qualitative questions that anybody living publicly online is wondering quietly, like Was my joke any good? and, even more intimately, Do people care what I have to say? Last Monday, I published an article about the history of American innovation as seen through a study of patent text literature. This study found that chemistry concepts dominated science in the early 20th century, but from the 1980s on, the most-cited terms in patent texts were almost entirely in the fields of medicine and computers. Yesterday, chemistry; today, computers. This seemed like a catchy parallel, which might strike some as illuminating and others as over-simplifying. In other words, the perfect tweet. I wrote this message, with a link, and a picture: By Friday morning, it had about 155,260 impressions. According to the new Tweet activity dashboard, 2.9 percent of those users clicked the image, and 1.1 percent retweeted or favored it ... ... but just 1 percent clicked on the link to actually read my story. One percent. Even worse, of the 9,017 people who clicked somewhere, anywhere on my message, just one in six of those clicks actually went to The Atlantic website. Quantitatively speaking, my viral tweet had the click-through rate of a digital display ad in East Asia. Every good media organization knows that the road to traffic leads through Facebook rather than Twitter. Even so, I thought the sharing economy of the Internet shared a bit more than this. A tweet with 10,000 interactions is an exception, and I was interested in the rule. So I went to Twitter's user analytics page to download the data on my 100 most popular tweets of the last year. If I could prove to my bosses (and to myself) that Twitter could, even occasionally, deliver meaningful audiences, it might validate my infatuation. Alas, my most popular tweets averaged a click-through rate of about 1.7 percent, still quite near the rate of conversions on flash-media East Asian display ads. Without revealing numbers that will get me in trouble with my bosses, I concluded that my prodigious use of Twitter in the last 30 days has cumulatively driven less traffic to TheAtlantic.com than one of my below-average stories. Is the social web just a matrix of empty shares, of hollow generosity? As Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile once said (on Twitter), there is "effectively no correlation between social shares and people actually reading." People read without sharing, but just as often, perhaps, they share without reading. When I graphed my 100 most popular tweets by clicks (graph one below) and engagement (graph two), the result is a jagged mess. Many of my most engaged tweets barely generated any clicks. Readers treated the URL in the tweet as a footnote. Some tweets, you might say, are "too good to click": They offer such a complete story that it leaves no curious itch. Twitter as Television: Watch But Don't Click There used to be a vague sense that Twitter drives traffic, and traffic drives renown (or fame, or pride, or whatever word defines the psychic benefit of public recognition). Instead, the truth is that Twitter can drive one sort of renown (there are some people who are Twitter-famous), and traffic affords a different psychic currency. But they are nearly independent variables. I wanted another perspective. So I wrote an email to my Atlantic colleague Robinson Meyer, who has established himself as one of the smarter commentators on the peculiarities of digital media. I told him I had created something that 150,000 people had seen, 9,000 people had interacted with, and just 1,500 had followed to our site to actually read. (So, 99 percent of my labor on Twitter went to Twitter, and 1 percent went to The Atlantic. That's not a very good deal for our boss!) It was, I told Rob, as if Twitter had built a feature illustrating how much people were ignoring its power users. Rob responded: It’s kind of a funny feature, right? It can tell you exactly how many people saw and how many people ignored it, basically (minus the impossible metric: how many people thought of you.) It’s a funny bit of information to give away. Maybe there’s a comparison to Snapchat Discover here. Twitter was a great mobile journalism platform, and it was very good at getting people to read… Twitter. But people functionally left it no more than they actually can leave Snapchat. So at least Snapchat lets you take some reader ad revenue. (Rob’s response alluded to Snapchat’s new “Discover” feature, which serves up content from cable networks and popular news sites within Snapchat.) It's fair to come away from these metrics thinking that Twitter is worthless. But that's an unsophisticated conclusion. The more sophisticated takeaway is that Twitter is worthless for the limited purpose of driving traffic to your website, because Twitter is not a portal for outbound links, but rather a homepage for self-contained pictures and observations. (The irony is that the more journalists consider Twitter a portal, the better Twitter becomes as a home for other people to stay, including other journalists.) Two weeks ago, John Herrman observed that as readers' digital attention scatters to Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, publishers will acknowledge that their websites are anachronisms. It's hard to say that this is happening today. Most major websites are seeing growing traffic. But there are only so many hours one can look at a screen in a day. More of those hours are going to mobile devices. A growing share of those hours (and their corresponding dollars) are going to communications apps, like Twitter. And, by my calculations here, Twitter is sending less than 2 percent of its overall engagement back to the web. Apps don't pay my rent. A website does. In the last month, I've created nearly 2 million impressions for Twitter. Whether that is good for my Twitter persona and my pride is a qualitative question whose answer resides outside the bounds of an analytics dashboard. But it is quantitatively not a good deal for The Atlantic. Something I already suspected has now been made crystal clear: 99 percent of my work on Twitter belongs to Twitter.
How the US plans to dampen ISIS' online message - AOL.com - AOL News
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