When people or couples get close to retirement, they take the biggest gamble of their lives without really knowing what lies ahead. We all are forced to do it at some point and we really are just guessing at our financial and health care futures. Questions you have to ask yourself: How long will you or your partner live? How much money will you need to survive comfortably? What about medical costs? Will my children, if I have any, have to take me in?

I am about two years from retiring and my wife and I plan to retire the same day. Her birthday. I feel like I still don't know everything I should know before taking that leap and I was wondering if anyone out there has retired or is retiring soon that wishes they had done something differently or could share something that they are glad that they did before they retired? I speak to my state retirement system representative annually and I know what my defined benefit will be. Any other suggestions that would help me during this transition to retirement financial or otherwise?

Thank you

This cowardly frat boy crawls out of the woodwork like we actually give a damn.

https://postimg.cc/qtkFZtvc

Children aren't born racists, racism is something they learn from their parents. One of my kids makes an annual summer trek south to Missouri for his/her partner's family get-together which usually involves a week or so of hard drinking and vocal racism at some rented cabin near a lake. My child is just not that into drinking but the Missouri relatives are straight up alcoholics.

My offspring, grew up in the north and with pretty liberal parents and met her/his partner at college. Having escaped the small southern town to get an education, my child's partner realized what a racist upbringing he/she had lived through but still attends the family get-together on an annual basis.

This may be the last year. According to my child, the racism and bigotry is on full display this year. My child has decided to call them out and I fear that this may cause a rift with the in-laws that may never heal.

Any advice on how my child can approach the subject without being ostracized by her/his partner's entire family and friends? I see no way around the inevitable here.

The racism in southern states is very real and generational. I suppose that you can find racism anywhere in the country but the south has it's own flavor of racism that persists from parent to child generation in and generation out. How to deal with this dynamic when it involves your family is a challenge with few viable solutions. As long as racism is being passed down to the next generation, we will have racism in this country well into the future. How sad people do that to their own children.

Last I looked, it was at $1,330 and climbing.

The buffoon resting his giant ass in the oval office with his tiny finger on the nuclear button has essentially dragged the reputation, the honor, and the prestige of our highest office straight into the gutter. From his mobster tendencies to his stripper wife and all the way down to his clueless corrupt children, this orange wanker has plunged this country into the sewer that he and his family crawled out of. He doesn’t deserve our pity, our sympathy, or our tolerance but he does deserve to be run out of town on the next garbage barge headed out to the middle of the Atlantic. Even king of a floating garbage patch is too good for this slime weasel. He likes to talk in absolute record breaking terminology so I say let him have the record for being the worst idea a smaller number of popular votes ever came up with. He clearly ranks someplace below pond scum and gonorrhea on the list of least favorite things as voted on by all human beings.

So stupid in fact, that he doesn't know how stupid he is. Does that sound like another group **cough* *cough* Trump supporters... that are too dumb to know just how dumb they are?

When Trump throws out some B.S. statistics or claims some enormous number that is nowhere near the actual number of something, he isn't actually lying, he is just talking out of his ass so much that he has no idea what the actual truth is.

I think we give him too much credit when we say that he is lying. In order to lie, you have to also know what the truth is that you are lying about. Trump doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground.

His "lies" get more and more ridiculous by the day if you take them as lies. If you think of him as just some kind of idiot incapable of knowing truth from fiction, his behavior makes way more sense.

This man needs to removed from office out of sheer incompetence.

Does it ever seem that terrorists using terrorism to incite racial hatred only end up inciting terrorists on the other side and the rest of us are caught in the middle of their sick twisted ideologies and perverse mass murder sprees? I was recently struck by a FB post I saw that quoted a Breitbart story about a Nigerian killing in a Christian church most likely carried out by Boko Haram. The story was posted the same day as the New Zealand tragedy and the comment was, "And nobody will even report this" as if this ongoing war in Nigeria balances out the killing by this white supremacist in New Zealand.

So now acts of terrorism will be a tit-for-tat exchange along religious lines with the victims always being the rest of us. And the worst part is that people will justify these murderers by pointing out that the other side killed some group previously. Anyone with a brain can see where this kind of madness will lead us. The shooter in New Zealand wasn't acting ostensibly as a Christian but often white supremacists are associated with white Christians either by self-identification or by non-Christian fanatics.

This is no coincidence. As we all know, an organized crime syndicate headed by Putin has been running Russia for years. The Russian people know this. The world knows this. And now thanks to this criminal organization, with nukes...just sayin', the U.S. is now being run by a criminal organization not substantively different than the criminals running Russia.

How did we acquiesce to this so easily and find ourselves mired in this situation when we should have already marched on Washington en masse and taken our government back from these criminals? If Russia proves anything, the longer we wait, the more entrenched they become. I think Cohen's warning about the handover of power not going well if Trump loses the 2020 election was a dire warning. I believe him on this point 100% especially if it means Trump will then be indicted upon leaving office.

I think that this summer has to be the summer we take this country out of the hands of the Republicans and their idiot leader. We need march after march on Washington until we once a again have a democracy we can take pride in.

I just went out at lunch today and picked up my taxes from the accountant. I wasn't exactly sure what to expect given that my household income was pretty much the same as last year, my tax deductions and federal withholding amounts were not much different than last year, and my dependents stayed the same.

After all was said and done, I paid an extra $1,000 dollar in taxes on April 15th last year. This year, I will owe an extra $4,000 in federal taxes.

If you haven't done your taxes this year, you can pretty much expect to be in shock at what your middle class tax cut will end up costing you. At least you can take comfort in knowing that millionaires and billionaires can now deduct the cost of their private jets.

Has anyone else here had the same experience? I feel your pain.

...turned around and started talking about the cost of prescriptions and how they keep going up. I thought, "Okay, this guys wants to complain a little and he has the right, he's been around long enough." The next words out of his mouth I maybe should have expected but I was still amazed to hear them just the same.

He said that that crazy woman in New York was going to promise everything to the young people like free medicine, free schooling, free everything just to get votes. I had to ask, but I think that I already knew, what crazy woman he was talking about. He said, "that Ocasio woman". I told him that those things weren't true but that is how Republicans were trying to characterize her policies. In his best Fox News parroting voice he said, "That it was socialism."

He went back to talking about health care and said that we couldn't afford the 9 million dollars for free health care for everyone. I knew what he meant...kind of. So I said, "How is it that places that aren't nearly as rich as this country like Canada, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and pretty much every industrialized country on the planet can afford to provide health care for their citizens and we can't?"

I didn't know an 80 something year old could snap his head back around that fast. I didn't stop. I told him that we could easily provide that same health benefits our European allies provide to their citizens. I told him that the U.S. spends about 34 trillion on health care in 10 years and if we had universal health care, it would actually cost about 2 trillion less over the same period. I just kept whispering facts and statistics over his shoulder as he waited for his turn.

You've never seen a man so grateful to finally reach the head of any line.