Personal Finance

Did you know that, in most cases, you must start taking required minimum distributions (RMDs) from your retirement accounts each year once you reach age 73? IRS rules require that you take withdrawals from individual retirement accounts (IRAs) and employer-sponsored retirement plans to avoid costly penalties.

Be sure you understand the requirements about RMDs and how they apply to you.

Health savings accounts (HSAs) are investment accounts that allow you to set aside pre-tax dollars for “qualified medical expenses” to pay for outlays not covered by your health insurance plan. By setting aside money pre-tax, your contributions don’t count toward your adjusted gross income at the end of the year. But in order to take advantage of HSAs, you’ll need to understand how they work and the rules that apply.  

Investment fraud involving the use of artificial intelligence (AI) is on the rise. Increasingly, fraudsters are using generative AI (Gen AI) tools to gain access to financial accounts and create new accounts in the names of unsuspecting investors.

Your brokerage firm issues a trade confirmation every time you buy or sell a security. When a single tap or keystroke can make the difference between 100 and 1,000 shares, it’s important to review this information carefully as soon as you receive a confirmation.

Investors make millions of online stock trades each day. But have you ever thought about how online stock trading works? Once you hit enter on an order to buy or sell a stock, what happens next? There might be more steps in the stock trade process than you realize.

Smartphones have been a boon to productivity and convenience. Many consumers have shifted their banking and investment transactions to the time-saving apps on their phones. But along with convenience, a reliance on mobile devices has attracted scammers looking to steal information and assets. A growing type of fraud exploiting mobile phone usage is known as SIM swapping.

If you receive a stock award from an employer, you become a part-owner of the company and can benefit if its share price goes higher. Like any other investment, though, stock awards come with risks. If your company grants you a stock award or you're considering a job that includes equity compensation, here are a few questions to consider:

You probably know that investing involves risk. Different investment products and strategies involve different degrees of risk. Generally, the higher the expected returns of a product or strategy, the greater the risk that you could lose most or all of your investment. 

So what level of risk is too much? This isn’t a simple question, and there’s no “right” answer. 

Like other fixed-income securities, baby bonds typically feature a specified maturity rate and schedule of interest payments. Baby bonds, though, are issued in smaller denominations than most other types of corporate bonds, which can make them seem like an easy way to access the bond markets. But a smaller investment minimum doesn’t mean that this type of bond has lower risks.

Shell companies—companies that have no or nominal business operations or non-cash assets for an extended period of time—can be used for legitimate purposes. However, they can also be used by fraudsters as vehicles for stock manipulation.