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More and more over the years, working people in this country have found that the laws have been actively shifting responsibility for American workers’retirement survival away from the companies that employ them, onto the workers themselves. Apparently, the fact of the change hasn’t really sunk in yet, because there are far too many people who are still providing inadequately for a retirement income, come the day they need to step out of the workforce. It’s as if they still think that they have a comfortable pension to look forward to. My father, in the middle of the cratering of the stock market two years ago, was just 60, and freshly retired. He had no pension, and his Social Security benefits were still years away. He had nothing to go on but his savings. He wanted to exercise the option of cashing out his stocks, but he was worried about how he would then have nothing to turn to if he lived to be 90.

When all these newly-retired people all around who had just been set free of a life of hard work watched their entire life’s work disappear as the stock market went up in smoke, the general advice they got back then, what my father got too, was to withdraw less each month to preserve their capital, and then to go work at Wal-Mart. Now my father did not want to do that; and his reasons were novel. He felt that he would only need to see his investments differently in his mind. He visualized having two sets of investments – one was cash and bonds that could see him through the first half of his retired life; the other part was the stocks he held that had taken a beating in the recession. He thought he would leave his stock funds untouched, and believe that they would bounce back one day so that they could fund the latter part of his retirement.

Believe it or not, this plan that my father has picked for himself is exactly the thing that experts recommend these days; in fact, it’s been bandied about for about two decades now. As long as you had a stock market that’s treating you well in retirement, the 4% rule, the undisputed benchmark in retirement planning, applied. The rule says that as long as things are going well, you’re supposed to invest your retirement nest egg about 60% in stocks and 40% in bonds. You can start out withdrawing 4% a year, and go up on a sliding scale from there to keep up with inflation. They said that you had a 90% chance of staying solvent up until your last day this way. The rule however, does not really hold together in severely difficult times such as these.

The main spanner in the works in finding a way to fund retirement income is inflation. If it weren’t for it, you would just need to invest in bonds to be set for life. But with inflation, you need to invest in something that will grow your fund because even with very low inflation, in 20 years, your dollar will buy you just half of what it does now. A great way to guarantee a decent retirement income would be to divide into five-year periods the time you have after your retirement, and adopt a different strategy for each five-year period. In the first phase, as soon as you retire in a time like this when interest you get approaches zero, you put your money in an immediate payout annuity for a five-year period. Once this is done with, you’ll need to find a deferred annuity or a bond ladder to generate your retirement income. The idea is that each phase of your retirement asks for a slightly more risky investment strategy to make up for your falling capital, and for rising inflation.

Of course there are some who say that this kind of measured response will do nothing through a difficult financial period such as this. They say, invest in mutual funds as aggressively as you can, because trusting in the markets is your best chance.

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They’ve been pointing for years to how healthcare and pension responsibilities bankrupted General Motors. And they’ve said that it is only a matter of time before it happens to the Social Security System as well. Perhaps we stand at the dawn of that day. The terrible financial turmoil of the last two years, the cratered housing market, the unemployment, the recession, have all been really hurting Social Security to the point that finally, this year, there is so little coming in in taxes, that there is going to be less money going into the system than getting paid out. Nobody thought that this day would come for another five years. Of course, there is no immediate cause for worry; even if in this very year, the system starts to go into the red. But why this year of all the times it could have happened?

It’s for two reasons. To begin with, the Social Security system is funded on payroll taxes. With fewer people drawing any real salary, there is far less coming in. The people who are not drawing a salary today, can’t starve; they just apply for their Social Security support far sooner than they ever thought they would. So there is more money going out than anyone expected. And the Social Security program is finally on its way to bankruptcy. The only thing that’s being done to protect it now, is to tax the country more, to find new sources of income.

The last time that the Social Security System seemed to be in dire straits was 30 years ago. The system was left with funds enough for a mere few months at the time. But the country has had great economic performance for all the years since then, and the coffers are full enough that there won’t be any bankruptcy for another quarter century. But what does all this mean? What happens when the country’s population actually falls as it is doing in Europe, where there are more old people than young in the population? Whose paychecks will they tax to fund the system? Very nearly 50 million families claim those Social Security checks each month, even today.

The basic thing you need to understand is that the money paid out as Social Security is not free mercy money from the government. This is money each worker sets out of his salary each month during his work life. If the Social Security goes bankrupt, it doesn’t mean that people have been dipping into it for free money. It only means that people have taken out what they paid in, working their whole lives. One way to deal with the problem would be to do what we did once before – you raise the retirement age. You can’t have people retiring around the same age today as they did 50 years ago. Life expectancy has risen, and people could expect to spend perhaps 15 years in retirement. Today, people expect, often, to spend 25 years in retirement. That is clearly unsustainable. To make the Social Security system solvent like it was 50 years ago, people would have to be allowed to work until 70. That would go down a lot better with people than raising taxes.

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In the official 9/11 Commission Report, this curious bit of 9/11 information wasn’t even discussed. Another, little-known bit of 9/11 information is stunning in its disingenuity.

A newscaster on one of the major networks reported on the breakdown of Building seven a full twenty mins before the event!

Likewise , the building was not hit by an aeroplane or anything more. Why did that building collapse and why did the news report predate the event by twenty minutes?

Read rest of the text of this article on 9/11 information

You can be subject to different degrees of background check according to the importance of your job. If you will be handling sensitive information such as financial records or social security numbers, the check into your background will be quite thorough. Also, most state and federal jobs require a background check regardless of the type of work you will be doing. Part of the background check is running your social security number to see if you have a criminal record. This is a very basic background check, similar to a credit check and can be cheaply and easily performed. A more thorough background check may involve a third-party company that contacts the people who know you or that you have known in your life to find out about more about your character. Get the full article at: Background Check

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