Dear Liz: All of our insurance policies list my name and that of my husband. After the recent devastating Los Angeles fires, I heard from friends that we should add the name of our living trust to our home insurance policy because our house is in the trust. Otherwise, they say, some insurance companies may not cover loss or damages to it due to the discrepancy in the names, even if the trust has both of our names as trustees. Would you please confirm this?
Answer: Yes. If your home is in a trust, your insurance policies should list your trust as an “additional insured.” Insurance companies vary in their contract language, but you don’t want to find out after the fact that you aren’t covered.
Conventional wisdom is to wait until you are 70 to file for social security. However, if you are able to wait, that probably means that if you filed before 70, you are able to take those payments and invest them. So, for some people, shouldn’t the expected rate of return from the investment of those payments be taken into consideration when deciding when to start collecting?
Of course. All you would have to do is beat a guaranteed 8% annual return, which is what delayed retirement credits are worth when you put off applying after your full retirement age. Spoiler alert: there’s no other investment you could choose that offers that kind of guaranteed return. While the stock market may offer you more on occasion, it can also hand you losses.
In this case, conventional wisdom is backed by years of research incorporating life spans, alternate investment returns and (most importantly for couples) survivor benefits. This paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research sums it up pretty well, and cites some of the many other studies that have concluded waiting is best for the vast majority:
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w30675/w30675.pdf