A digest of timely information and insight about finance, investing, and retirement.

Good news and bad news for people thinking about retirement | CNBC
Nearly half of Americans anticipate an uncomfortable retirement. Don’t listen to them. People are pessimistic about their financial future, but when their later decades finally roll around, well, they’re not so bad, according to new findings from Gallup. After retirement, the share of people who report being comfortable swells to nearly 80 percent, the survey discovered.

What retirees need to know about rising Medicare costs | CNBC
This year, high-income retirees can expect to shell out even more money to cover their Medicare premiums. That’s because as of 2018, there is a shift in the income brackets that are used to determine how much older Americans will pay for their Medicare Part B (preventive services) and Part D coverage for prescription drugs, according to a recent analysis by HealthView Services, a provider of health-care cost projection software.

The best countries to retire in (America’s not on the list) | MarketWatch
You may want to pack your bags because the United States did not make the list of 50 countries where it’s cheapest to retire. India ranked first, as ex-patriots would pay 93 percent less in rent than they would for a New York City apartment and save 70 percent on groceries, according to personal finance site GoBankingRates. Also ranked high on the list were Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Czech Republic, Germany, Turkey, and Taiwan. What makes them so great? The low cost of living, the less expensive health care, and the purchasing power Americans would have, to name a few.

How rising rents are impacting retirees | MarketWatch
Boomers and Gen Xers are now the most “rent-burdened” Americans, according to a new Pew Charitable Trusts report, Americans Face a Growing Rent Burden. And things have only been getting worse for them. Pew defines rent-burdened as spending 30 percent or more of your income on rent; people who spend 50 percent or more on rent are, in Pew’s words, “severely rent burdened.”

This map shows how long $1 million in retirement savings will last in every state | Time-Money
Location, location, location. It’s the battle hymn for buying real estate and a huge factor for retirees looking to make their savings last. All things being equal, $1 million in savings will last nearly twice as long in “low-cost” states such as Arkansas or Kansas than it will in Hawaii, according to an analysis of state-by-state retirement cost-of-living data by HowMuch.net. What mattered most? Not surprisingly, housing costs and healthcare are the biggest variables to extending retirement savings.

No luck finding the right nursing home? Maybe Yelp can help | The New York Times
Can you really select a quality nursing home by reading Yelp reviews? Gerontologists at the University of Southern California have been looking into Yelp nursing home reviews and think they make a useful addition to the homework any prospective resident or family member needs to undertake. It’s not that reviews posted to online platforms like Yelp are such reliable guides to nursing home quality, said Anna Rahman, senior author of a recent article in The Gerontologist. It’s that the supposed gold standard, the five-star ratings on the federal government’s own Nursing Home Compare website, remains so faulty.