Retirement and Longevity

The site the former Wall Street Journal columnist built, listed again because retirement is its center of gravity. Since his death in 2025 readers write the essays, and they are about real decisions: when to claim, whether to downsize, what a widow does in the first year. Free newsletter. No products sold.

A retirement-planning blog written by people who retired early and then kept doing the math in public. The posts on healthcare before Medicare, on sequence risk, and on what actually changed after quitting are more honest than most advisors. Weekly email. Read it if you are within ten years.

Fritz Gilbert documented his own final years of work and first years of retirement, week by week, and the archive is the useful part. He writes about the non-financial side, purpose, marriage, time, as seriously as the money. Practical, warm without being soft. A good one to send a parent who is about to stop working.

Wade Pfau is the academic most cited on retirement income, and this weekly newsletter curates the research for a lay reader. It is drier than the others on this list and more rigorous. Read it when you want the evidence on annuities, withdrawal rates or long-term-care insurance rather than an opinion. It sells courses; the newsletter stands on its own.

Public media's newsroom for people over fifty, funded like public television and written like a magazine. It covers caregiving, money, health and work as beats, with real reporting. The email newsletters are free and not selling anything. If you read one general-interest source on aging, make it this one.

Kiplinger has covered personal finance since the 1940s, and the twice-weekly retirement letter is its best product. Taxes, Social Security, required distributions, state-by-state retiree tax maps. It is conventional, which is a virtue when the subject is the IRS. Free, with ads.

A large, free personal-finance newsletter that runs several afternoons a week, aimed at Americans from thirty to retirement. Mortgages, insurance, banking, retirement, in plain language and short pieces. It is a digest rather than a voice. Useful for staying current without a subscription bill.

A daily wealth-building newsletter from FinanceBuzz, for the reader who wants to grow net worth rather than just protect it. Savings, investing, and the early-retirement math, told briskly. It skews younger than the rest of this list, which is why it is here: it is the one to forward to your own children.

A daily health newsletter written for readers over forty-five, mostly women, that reads the studies so you do not have to. Sleep, joints, memory, what the latest headline actually found. It is the longevity half of retirement, taken as seriously as the money. Short, and it cites its sources.