Seven Retirement Equations (Robertpowell, Marketwatch)

 

Robert Powell

June 27, 2012, 12:02 a.m. EDT

7 equations to build a secure retirement

By Robert Powell, MarketWatch

BOSTON (MarketWatch)—The Judeo-Christian world has its 10 commandments. Newton has his three laws of motion. And now retirement has its seven equations.

Actually, the world of retirement has had these equations for a while, in some cases for hundreds of years. But Moshe Milevsky, a York University professor, has put all these equations into one readable and, truth be told, highly accessible book, “The 7 Most Important Equations for Your Retirement.”
In his book, Milevsky reveals not just the equations, but he also provides portraits of the people and ideas that are behind all our retirement planning. Here’s a look at the equations that both students of retirement and would-be students need to know if they want to build a bulletproof retirement plan.

1. How long will your money last?

If you want to know how long your nest egg might last, consider equation No. 1, which was developed by Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci some 800 years ago, back in the early part of the 13th century.

Fibonacci, who is best known for introducing and popularizing the Hindu–Arabic number system in the Western world (we dare you to use Roman numerals to perform long division) and a number sequence that bears his name, also gets credit for this one: the present value analysis.
That right, credit Fibonacci—who Milevsky calls the first financial engineer or quant—when you want the answer to this question: How long will your nest egg last in retirement if you were to stop contributing today and instead withdraw a fixed amount each year while earning a fixed interest rate each year for the rest of your life?
So, for instance, if you have $250,000 set aside for retirement earning 4% per year and you plan to withdraw $12,000 per year, your money would last 45 years. If, however, you decide to withdraw $24,000 per year, your money would last just 13 years.
Today, there are sophisticated ways of figuring out how long your nest egg will last, but this equation, wrote Milevsky, “provides a quick and sobering assessment of whether you can maintain your standard of living, or when the money will run out if you can’t.”
And oh by the way, Milevsky thinks Fibonacci likely retired wealthy and didn’t outlive his assets. The city of Pisa gave Fibonacci an annual pension of 20 Pisan pounds for life for service to the city.
You can use a spreadsheet/calculator with the each of the equations detailed in Milevsky’s book at this website.

2. How long will I spend in retirement?

Benjamin Gompertz gets credit for discovering and formulating the first natural law of human mortality nearly 200 years ago. It, in essence, is the equation that answers this question: Given your family history, current lifestyle, and recent medical experience, what are the chances that you, your spouse, or both will live to age 90, 95, or 100?

It’s also the equation that answers not only you long you (and/or your spouse) will live and but also how long your money has to last. And that is no small matter: “It’s quite senseless to conduct any sort of financial planning without devoting some time to the topic of human longevity,” Milevsky wrote of Gompertz’ law of mortality.
Now, at the moment, many financial advisers and do-it-yourselfers often use preselected time horizons when building a retirement plan. But the problem with this approach, Milevsky wrote, is that you really shouldn’t be picking a time horizon in advance. “Fibonacci’s equation was just the beginning,” Milevsky wrote. “Life is random, and you know it. In my opinion, the next step is a scientific approach to retirement income planning is to understand how random your remaining life span really can be.”
So, to make an informed decision, Milevsky says you need to know the odds of living to various ages. “Then you can decide how long you want to plan for, and—more importantly—how you plan to adjust your spending if you live to a very old age.”
And that’s were Gompertz’ equation comes in. Gompertz, who spent much of his research life studying records of death, discovered that the rate at which people die grows exponentially over time. According to Milevsky, he discovered that your probability of dying in the next year increases by about 9% per year from adulthood until old age. Death, said Milevsky, was following its own immutable law.
How, you might wonder, does this equation work in the world of retirement planning? In essence, it answers this question: What’s the chance of living to a certain age given your current age. So, for instance, there’s a 27.2% probability of you living to age 90 if you are currently 55. Of note, there’s only a 2.3% chance you’ll live to 100 if you’re 55, according to the equation in Milevsky’s spreadsheet.
And here’s how this might play out in a real retirement plan: Given that you don’t whether you’ll be among 27.2% who live to age 90, you might “consider buying insurance that pays off if you actually reach that age so that you don’t have to worry about it for the first 20 years of your retirement,” Milevsky suggested. Call it, he wrote, a delayed pension.

3. Do you have a true pension?

Edmond Halley, who as many know discovered Halley’s comet, gets credit for an equation that many workers might find useful today: the formal expression for the value of a pension annuity. In other words, it’s the equation that reveals the present value of a stream of payments from an annuity or a traditional defined benefit pension.

By way of history, Milevsky wrote, that kings and queens in the late 17th century would borrow money from their loyal subjects with a promise to pay them back a lifetime pension. (Then, as now, the kings and queens failed to set aside or compute reserves to make those payments, Milevsky wrote.)
And what’s noteworthy about this equation is how it can be applied in today’s world more than 300 years after the Royal Society asked Halley to figure out how to price and value life annuities.
Case in point: Let’s say you are a retired white-collar worker at Ford Motor Company or General Motors and you’ve been offered the option—as just happened—of either taking monthly payments guaranteed for life from their retirement plan or a lump sum. Would you rather $1,000 a month for life, or a lump sum of $300,000? Well, one way to determine which option is the better deal is to calculate the net present value of the stream of payments with the lump-sum offer.
In essence, Halley’s “equation tells you what the lifetime pension that most defined benefit plans offer when you retire is really worth,” said Milevsky.
The equation can be applied in other ways as well. For instance, if you have money in a 401(k) plan, you can use the equation to determine what sort of guaranteed monthly income you could generate from a lifetime annuity with that money.
So, for instance, if you’re 65 and expect to get $30,000 per year from your pension, Halley’s equation lets you know that the net present value of that pension, assuming a discount rate of 1.5%, is $492,933.

4. What is a proper spending rate?

Retirees are often told replace 70% to 80% of their pre-retirement income in retirement and spend no more than 4% of their nest egg each year in retirement, Milevsky wrote. But that’s not how things work in reality. In reality, retirees don’t have a constant standard of living in retirement, he said. In reality, retirees have preferences. Some want to spend more earlier rather than later in retirement and some want to do the exact opposite.

And to figure out how much less or more you should spend each year in retirement you would turn Irving Fisher’s equation. Fisher, some are likely to recall, is the infamous professor at Yale University who said that “stock prices are at a permanently high plateau” right before the market crashed in October of 1929. But Fisher, according to Milevsky, is also the first person to properly formulate how rational consumers should adjust their consumption spending over time. “He was the first to tell us how to properly accumulate and spend our next egg,” Milevsky said.
Fisher’s “equation” considers four factors: the real interest rate your nest egg is earning while it waits to be spent; your personal rate of patience or your subjective discount rate, the probability of surviving for one year, and your attitude to longevity uncertainty.
Now we won’t get too far into the weeds. Suffice to say Irving’s equation will tell you how much to reduce or increase your spending in retirement given your preferences. “There’s absolutely no reason why your planned consumption must be flat for the rest of your life,” Milevsky wrote. “Sure you can do that if you want, but that means you’re depriving yourself early on in retirement.”
In other words, enjoy it while you can.

5. How much in risky stocks vs. safe cash?

What percent of your portfolio should you invest in stocks while in retirement? Well, when you want the answer to that question consider using Paul Samuelson’s equation. Samuelson, the famous MIT professor, was the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1970, and gets credit for introducing an asset allocation equation that’s relevant of your entire life cycle, not just retirement.

Samuelson, viewed by Milevsky and others as the greatest economic scholar of the late 20th century, introduced the notion that stocks don’t become less risky over time, that there was no such thing as time diversification. And, he and his disciples including Boston University professor Zvi Bodie, claimed that the only safe asset was a risk-free, inflation-adjusted government bond (TIPS and I-Bonds). “Anything else carried risk, and that risk didn’t disappear in the long run, or even in the very long run,” Milevsky wrote. “Samuelson argued that time alone was not an excuse to hold more stocks. Time did not diversify away risk. Time was not on your side. In fact, time was irrelevant, he said.”
According to Samuelson, the optimal amount of stocks vs. bonds was time-invariant.
Now to get to how much stock you should own, you need to consider six factors: the amount of financial capital you’ve accumulated; the value of your human capital; your expected rate of return on your money; your expectations for the volatility of stocks; the risk-free rate of return; and your risk aversion.
So, for instance, let’s say you have $500,000 in financial capital and the value of your human capital—the present value of your future earnings—is $600,000. And let’s say the risk-free rate of return is 1.5% and that stocks are expected to earn 6.5% with a variability of 20%. According to the formula, you ought to invest $458,333 in risky assets, or nearly 92% of your financial capital.
What should those approaching retirement do? According to Milevsky, consider these tips: One, even if you are risk averse, if you invest too much in stocks and something goes wrong, you might not be able to recover. Two, if you’re still working and can delay retirement, you’re wealthier than you think, and you can afford to take on more risk. And three, volatility will determine optimal exposure and allocation to stocks, Milevsky wrote. (For his part, Milevsky predicts that “structured equity products” and other “protected equity products” and products that reduce downside risk will play a big role in optimal retirement portfolios.)

6. What is your financial legacy?

How much money do you want or plan to leave your loved ones? Is legacy important to you? If so, you’ve no doubt earmarked some funds or an account to accomplish this goal. According to Milevsky, this desire is to be commended. But is it financially affordable?

To find out, you’ll need to look at what life insurance can do for you, according to Milevsky. And to do that you need to look at the concept of human life value, a concept developed by Dr. Solomon Huebner. According to Milevsky, “the human life value is the present value of all the wages, salary and income a breadwinner will earn over the course of his or her working life. And that value, which is in essence the human capital value, should be insured in much the same way property is insured, Milevsky wrote. “The capitalized worth of earning power of a life is an economic asset, just as truly as property,” Huebner once stated.
Now when it comes to creating a legacy, one thing you’ll need to figure out is the present value of a sum of money your beneficiaries will receive at some random time in the future. Getting the answer to this number can help you determine plenty of things, among whether to use life insurance to fund your bequests.
So, for instance, let’s say you are 65 years old and have a life insurance policy with a death benefit of $100,000. Assuming a discount rate of 1.5%, and an average life expectancy, the present value of your legacy—your death benefit—is $75,353. Knowing this number, if nothing else, puts a “value on one very large payment received by beneficiaries only at death,” wrote Milevsky.

7. Is my plan sustainable?

The one final unified equation that measures the sustainability of your retirement plan was developed by a Russian mathematician, Andrei Nikolaevich Kolmogorov. The equation, according to Milevsky, takes into account your age, current asset allocation, pension income, longevity and everything else on your balance sheet. In short, Kolmogorov’s equation answers this question: What is the probability your retirement plan is sustainable? “It’s a one-number summary,” said Milevsky.

This equation, though it might not be in plain English, “states the ruin probability multiplied by the instantaneous force of mortality must be exactly equal to the sum of three distinct terms,” Milevsky wrote. We’ll spare you the details about the three terms and get to the gist of the matter.
Let’s say you are 70 years old, you have $300,000 in your nest egg with an expected rate of return of 6.5%, and you plan to spend $45,000 per year in retirement. Given those facts, you would have a 75.26% chance of running out of money before your die, according to Kolmogorov’s equation. Reduce your spending to $20,000 and you would have just a 27.13% chance of running out of money before you die.
So as you can see, the very practical application of this equation is this: You can adjust your numbers to decrease the odds of running out of money before you die. And since no one wants to run out of money or lifestyle, this equation can serve a very useful role in retirement planning.

One final word

According to Milevsky, there is much that is uncertain about retirement planning. “But one thing is certain,” he wrote. “These seven equations and the science behind them will play a central role (in retirement planning) for many centuries to come.”
We couldn’t agree more.

Robert Powell is editor of Retirement Weekly, published by MarketWatch

 

Pay Less Taxes on Your IRA Withdrawals (WSJ)

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WEEKEND INVESTOR

Updated June 22, 2012, 5:20 p.m. ET

IRA Rules Get Trickier

By KELLY GREENE

Uncle Sam is about to get a lot tougher on individual retirement account mistakes—and that could trip up investors who aren't careful.

The government lets millions of dollars in tax penalties on IRAs go uncollected each year—$286 million in 2006 and 2007 alone for missed withdrawals and contributions that break the rules. The reasons range from bureaucratic hurdles to tax forms that don't provide enough information, according to a report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, the federal tax watchdog.

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Matt Collins

Now the Internal Revenue Service, which has been cracking down on secret foreign accounts and beefing up audits of high earners in recent years, is turning its attention to IRA snafus.

Some 46 million U.S. households, or two out of five, hold a combined $4.9 trillion in IRA assets, according to the Investment Company Institute. The more-aggressive enforcement means those investors need to make sure their accounts are in order—quickly.

The agency will report to the Treasury Department by Oct. 15 on how to go after taxpayers who make contribution or withdrawal errors, according to spokesman Eric Smith, who declined to provide details. The possibilities include additional paperwork that IRA owners would have to file with their tax returns and stepped-up audits, mainly matching up distribution reports from IRA custodians to individuals' tax returns.

 

"It's a wake-up call for anyone who has an IRA," says Martin Censor, a manager at the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. "The government needs money.…This is low-hanging fruit."

The tax penalties for running afoul of IRA rules are tough. People who fail to take a "required minimum distribution," usually starting at age 70½, can be hit with a penalty of 50% of the amount they should have withdrawn. The same levy applies to required withdrawals from an inherited IRA, including inherited Roth accounts. (Contributions to Roth IRAs aren't deductible, but withdrawals are tax-free after holding requirements are met.)

The IRS also is keeping a close eye on contributions to make sure taxpayers aren't secretly socking away extra money in an attempt to rack up tax-free earnings. The 2012 contribution limits for traditional and Roth IRAs are $5,000 per person, or $6,000 for people 50 or older. There are income limits for qualifying to make Roth contributions as well.

Making an "excess contribution"—meaning you contributed more than the annual limit to a traditional IRA or made a Roth contribution when your income was too high—can cost you 6% of the amount that wasn't allowed in the account. This can add up fast in cases where an excess contribution went undetected for many years. Sometimes, excess contributions also result when a transfer of assets from one IRA to another doesn't get done in the time allowed.

Arthur Elkin, a 60-year-old retired federal-government worker in Delaware, didn't realize he and his wife had made excess contributions to their Roth IRAs for seven years until he started working with a new accountant. Their income had topped the $150,000 maximum then allowed for making contributions, but their previous accountant hadn't caught the problem.

The couple had to file seven years of amended returns, withdraw the contributions and pay thousands of dollars in penalties and interest. The worst part, Mr. Elkin says: realizing that, had he kept preparing his own tax returns, as he had in the past, the software probably would have caught the error.

Although the IRS hasn't tipped its hand about its looming enforcement effort, IRA experts are urging accountants, financial planners and lawyers to brush up on the rules and help their clients clean up their IRAs before the IRS forces them to do so later this year or next.

"Accountants and lawyers have to be aware of the potential liability, because there's no statute of limitations on those 50% penalties," says Seymour Goldberg, a lawyer and CPA in Woodbury, N.Y.

The federal government has already begun questioning some taxpayers about their IRA activity.

In Austin, Texas, CPA Janet Hagy has had clients get "odd" IRA notices in the past few years, after they withdrew money from one IRA and deposited it in another account within the required 60 days. "They still get an IRS notice making them prove they rolled it over" and didn't simply withdraw the money without paying tax on it, she says.

And in Mooresville, Ind., CPA Martin James had to prove that a couple spreading the income they created in 2010 when they converted a traditional IRA to a Roth across their 2011 and 2012 tax returns, a one-time deal for conversions done that year, didn't owe $25,000 in taxes. He also had to show that another couple, who rolled money from an IRA into a health savings account, which is allowed one time, did it correctly.

Mr. James says he is baffled by the inconsistencies in who gets IRA notices, since a number of his clients did 2010 Roth conversions and moved assets from IRAs to HSAs. He chalks it up to computers not being able to match up the forms involved.

Worried that the IRS might look askance at something you have, or haven't, done with your IRA? Here are some of the most common mistakes, and how you can right them before the government detects your wrongs.

Failing to Withdraw

People in their 70s have to start taking money out of IRAs and pay the federal government its due. But the rules get complicated quickly.

IRA owners must start taking their required withdrawals from traditional IRAs by April 1 of the year after they turn 70½. Those withdrawals are calculated by dividing the total IRA balance as of Dec. 31 of the year before the owner turns 70½ by life expectancy, found in a table in IRS Publication 590. You use a separate life-expectancy table in the same publication if your spouse is more than a decade younger than yourself and your sole heir.

The IRS considers all of your IRAs to be a single account, so it is best to streamline where you can. If you take the entire withdrawal from one account and none from another, the other account's custodian still will report that you are subject to a required withdrawal.

For people with smaller IRAs, there may be some relief. A congressional bill introduced earlier this year would exempt IRAs worth less than $100,000 from withdrawal requirements.

There is big money at stake: For 2006 and 2007, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration estimated that 255,498 people failed to comply with the withdrawal requirements, leaving more than $348 million in accounts that should have been subject to income tax.

According to the inspector general's 2010 report on IRA compliance, the IRS conducted a project to pinpoint people with account balances of at least $1 million who didn't appear to take required minimum distributions. The 111 IRA holders were sent compliance letters, and 88 withdrew a total of $6.1 million from their accounts. As of 2010, an IRS compliance unit was working with the remaining 23 to ensure they took their withdrawals.

Another potential snag: If your money is in a 401(k), and you still are working for the employer that sponsors that account when you turn 70½ and you don't own more than 5% of the company, you don't have to make withdrawals from that account. But if you roll over your 401(k) to an IRA, you do.

Jean Hockenbrocht, a 76-year-old chocolate-factory worker in Lititz, Pa., says she missed four years of IRA withdrawals because her investment adviser confused those two rules. He had rolled her 401(k) to an IRA and mistakenly told her she could skip the distributions because she was still working.

When she started working with a new adviser, Joe Wirbick, in January, he realized the error, withdrew some $5,000 in missed distributions and helped her write a letter to the IRS. The key, Mr. Wirbick says, "was to let the IRS know that the minute she was made aware of the mistake, she corrected it by making all the previous distributions at once and will continue with future withdrawals." So far, she has received no response from the IRS.

Contributing Too Much

Generally, an excess contribution to a traditional IRA is any amount more than $5,000 a year, or $6,000 if you are 50 or older. But you can't contribute more than your "earned income," which trips up some people who manage their own property and investments, accountants say.

For IRA purposes, earned income includes wages, commissions and alimony, but not rental-property income, a pension or deferred compensation. (The complete list is in IRS Publication 590.)

If you realize you have made an excess contribution before Oct. 15 of the following year, you can correct it by withdrawing that amount, plus any interest. But many people aren't catching the mistakes, according to the IRS's 2010 review, which found that 295,141 people made excess contributions in 2006 and 2007 totaling nearly $1.6 billion.

Keep in mind that there is no statute of limitations in cases where the offender doesn't file a specific form, 5329, reporting the problem, according to a 2011 Tax Court ruling.

Inheriting an Account

When you inherit an IRA, the rules for making withdrawals are different from those governing regular IRAs, and even some financial professionals don't know them.

Here are the basics: If IRA owners are older than 70½ when they die, and they hadn't taken their required withdrawal for that year yet, the person inheriting the account has to do so for that year and report it as ordinary income on his or her own tax return.

If you inherit an IRA from anyone other than your spouse and you are a designated beneficiary, you have to, at the very least, take withdrawals across your own life expectancy starting the year after the death. (Again, you would use the life-expectancy tables in Publication 590.)

If you inherit an IRA from your spouse, you either can roll the account into your own IRA, or set up an inherited IRA and postpone taking required distributions until the deceased spouse would have turned 70½.

The trouble is that IRA custodians generally don't send annual notices to people who inherit IRAs making them aware of the distribution requirements, because it isn't required under the IRS rules, Mr. Goldberg says.

Even getting the money into an inherited account can be fraught.

Anne Baumann, a 58-year-old social-services caseworker in Rockland County, N.Y., was told by her father's financial adviser after his death that she had inherited an IRA worth about $30,000, and she had a choice between a lump-sum payout or five years of installments. She signed the paperwork to take it all at once.

When she relayed the news the next day to her own adviser, Beth Blecker, chief executive of Eastern Planning in Pearl River, N.Y., Ms. Blecker made several calls to the firm, and finally to its legal department, to get the check stopped.

Instead, she got the IRA transferred to another custodian and retitled as an inherited account. That way, Ms. Baumann will get payments across her life expectancy, and any earnings in the account are tax-deferred.

"I specifically asked the guy if I could roll it over, and he said, 'That's not one of the choices. You have to take it,'" Ms. Baumann recalls. "Now, I get a distribution every year."

Some cases don't end as well. Ed Slott, an IRA consultant in Rockville Centre, N.Y., recently came across the case of a 31-year-old woman who inherited an IRA at age 17 when her father died. Her family's adviser made a mistake, putting the $170,000 into her own IRA rather than retitling the father's account as an inherited IRA.

Now, the entire account balance is going to pay penalties since the IRA was really a taxable distribution 14 years ago, Mr. Slott says.

For that problem, "there was no solution, and it's not right," he says. "She was innocent. All that had to happen was an adviser put the money in an inherited IRA for her from day one."

Write to Kelly Greene at kelly.greene@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared June 23, 2012, on page B7 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: IRA Rules Get Trickier.

What to do when a loved one dies (from myfloridaprobate.com)

Survivor's Guide

The following is a list of issues that may need to be addressed when dealing with the decedent's estate:
1. Contact all applicable insurance companies (auto, life, health). You will need the following information: the policy number and/or social security number of the deceased, the full name of the deceased, the date and cause of death, a certified copy of the death certificate.
2. Request approximately 10 certified copies of the death certificate. If possible, request at least one without the cause of death on it for the probate court. Check with the funeral home director for assistance. You can also visit the U.S. Vital Statistics website, which provides listing for every state's Department of Vital Statistics. It's located here - http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/howto/w2w/w2welcom.htm
3. Locate the original Last Will and Testament and consult with a Florida attorney to determine what actions must be taken. Check for an established trust.
4. Contact the Veterans Administration for applicable benefits for the deceased and/or surviving spouse and dependent children. You will need the following information: certified copy of the death certificate, copy of your marriage certificate (spouses only), copies of the birth certificate for dependent children.
5. If the deceased was retired military: contact the Defense Finance and Accounting Service (Cleveland, OH) Casualty Assistance Line to report the death and check for survivor annuity (SBP, RSFPP). You will need the following information: certified copy of the death certificate, copy of your marriage certificate (spouses only), copies of the birth certificate for dependent children.
6. Contact Social Security to check on survivor benefits. You will need the following information: certified copy of the death certificate, Social Security Number of deceased, Social Security Number of spouse/dependents, birth certificates for spouse and dependent children, approximate earnings of deceased in past year/last employer.
If monthly benefits were being paid via direct deposit, notify the bank or other financial institution of the beneficiary's death. Request that any funds received for the month of death and later be returned to Social Security as soon as possible.
If benefits were being paid by check, DO NOT CASH any checks received for the month in which the beneficiary died or thereafter. Return the checks to Social Security as soon as possible.
A one-time payment of $255 is payable to the surviving spouse if he or she was living with the beneficiary at the time of death, OR if living apart, was eligible for Social Security benefits on the beneficiary's earnings record for the month of death. If there is no surviving spouse, the payment is made to a child who was eligible for benefits on the beneficiary's earnings record in the month of death.
7. Contact deceased's employer for possible group insurance or additional benefits.
8. Contact Civil Service Office of Personnel Management if deceased was an active or retired employee of the Civil Service.
9. Contact the holder of home/real estate loans for possible mortgage insurance coverage. Notify all creditors of the deceased's estate of the death. Check on credit life insurance.
10. Contact banks and/or credit unions for any insurance coverage on loans. Check on savings and checking accounts.
11. Contact any fraternal organizations or associations the deceased may have been a member of for assistance and to determine benefits.
12. Review financial paperwork for other details (check stubs, canceled checks, stocks and bonds, real estate, safe deposit boxes, etc.) Caution: do not open any safe deposit boxes without first consulting with an attorney.
13. If you are a spouse of the deceased, you should review your own life insurance policies to ensure that ownership and beneficiary designations are still current. Review your present amount of coverage and type of insurance with a financial professional.

Important Phone Numbers and Websites

The following is a list of phone numbers and web sites that you may find useful.

1. Social Security: 1-800-772-1213 www.ssa.gov
2. Veterans Administration 1-800-827-1000
3. Civil Service Personnel Management Office 1-888-767-6738
http://www.opm.gov/retire/html/contact/phone.asp
4. DFAS Casualty Assistance Office (Cleveland) 1-800-269-5170
http://www.military.com/Resources/ResourcesContent/0,13964,30867--,00.html
5. Office of Service Members Life Insurance 1-800-419-14736.
http://www.insurance.va.gov/sgliSite/SGLI/SGLI.htm
6. U.S. Vital Statistics - a site that provides a listing for every state's Department of Vital Statistics (a good resource for information on ordering certified copies of death certificates.) http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/howto/w2w/w2welcom.htm

7. Dept. of Public Debt, U.S. Treasury, for information on the transfer of ownership of U.S. Treasury bills, notes and bonds. http://www.publicdebt.treas.gov/sav/savdies.htm

8. Florida Clerk's of Court. A site that lists all of Florida's 67 Clerk's of Court websites http://dlis.dos.state.fl.us/fgils/coclerks.html

9. Florida Tax Collectors. A site that lists all of Florida's County Tax Collectors websites. A good resource for obtaining the status of county taxes on a Florida property. http://www.floridataxcollectors.com/TaxCollectors.cfm?CountyID=68

10. Florida Property Appraisers. A site that lists all of Florida's County Property Appraiser's websites. http://www.myflorida.com/dor/property/appraisers.html