CHICAGO (Reuters) – While it’s not trending as high on Twitter as #oomf (which stands for “one of my followers”), the hashtag #rothiramovement is hot in the personal finance Twitterverse right now.

Hashtags help Twitter users track a certain topic, and the Roth hashtag is being promoted by more than 140 bloggers. Many more social media users are retweeting, liking on Facebook and otherwise trying to achieve a singular goal: to boost interest in Roth IRAs among young people.

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Ordinary Americans have a lot at stake this week as the Supreme Court holds hearings on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

It is not clear what the outcome will be, and it is not clear where Americans stand on it. While two-thirds of Americans oppose the individual insurance mandate that is at the heart of the Obama Administration’s healthcare reform law, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation survey, the polls also reveal more nuanced attitudes.

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Seventy may be the new sixty — but not where the Internal Revenue Service is concerned. People who turned 70-1/2 last year must begin taking required annual withdrawals from their tax-deferred retirement accounts no later than Friday. Yet it seems that some of these seniors didn’t get the memo.

Fidelity Investments reports that nearly half (48 percent) of its IRA customers who hit the magic number in 2011 hadn’t yet taken their first Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs) as of late December. That percentage was up slightly from 2010, when 45 percent hadn’t taken RMDs by that time.

By Mark Miller

(Reuters) – The Republican Party doubled down on privatizing Medicare with the 2012 budget plan released yesterday by Republican Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin). It’s their latest pitch for a reform that would let seniors shop for coverage in an insurance exchange marketplace in lieu of traditional Medicare.

The Ryan plan has little chance of passage this year, but the decision by Republicans to stake out a strong position on Medicare privatization in an election year is significant. In their vision, starting in 2023, retirees would be given an allowance by the federal government to purchase medical coverage from a private insurer or traditional fee-for-service Medicare — a so-called “premium support.” Ryan has proposed several versions of this restructuring since late 2010, although the earliest versions didn’t offer traditional Medicare as a choice.

CHICAGO (Reuters) – When Harvey and Cora Alter decided to move away from Washington, D.C. for their retirement, friends were surprised to hear where they were going.

The Alters weren’t even crossing a state line. They would move just 30 miles north of Rockville, Maryland, where they had raised two daughters, to Frederick — a town of about 65,000 on the outskirts of the Washington-Baltimore metro area near the Catoctin Mountains.

By Mark Miller

(Reuters) – The Great Recession has left millions of midlife Americans up a creek without a paddle. Having lost jobs at the peak of their careers, they must find new work for the second half of their lives. Many will likely need to reinvent their careers — and may consider themselves too old to embark on something new.

Mark Walton begs to disagree.

The former CNN correspondent transformed his own career 20 years ago by becoming a Fortune 100 leadership consultant. Now 61, Walton has spent the past five years studying people who transformed their careers successfully in their 50s or early 60s, and invented new ways of working that extended into their 70s, 80s or even 90s.

CHICAGO (Reuters) – When Harvey and Cora Alter decided to move away from Washington, D.C. for their retirement, friends were surprised to hear where they were going.

The Alters weren’t even crossing a state line. They would move just 30 miles (50 km) north of Rockville, Maryland, where they had raised two daughters, to Frederick — a town of about 65,000 on the outskirts of the Washington-Baltimore metro area near the Catoctin Mountains.

CHICAGO (Reuters) – When Harvey and Cora Alter decided to move away from Washington, D.C., for their retirement, friends were surprised to hear where they were going.

The Alters weren’t even crossing a state line. They would move just 30 miles north of Rockville, Maryland, where they had raised two daughters, to Frederick — a town of about 65,000 on the outskirts of the Washington-Baltimore metro area near the Catoctin Mountains.

CHICAGO (Reuters) – When Harvey and Cora Alter decided to move away from Washington, D.C., for their retirement, friends were surprised to hear where they were going.

The Alters weren’t even crossing a state line. They would move just 30 miles north of Rockville, Maryland, where they had raised two daughters, to Frederick — a town of about 65,000 on the outskirts of the Washington-Baltimore metro area near the Catoctin Mountains.

CHICAGO (Reuters) – When Harvey and Cora Alter decided to move away from Washington, D.C., for their retirement, friends were surprised to hear where they were going.

The Alters weren’t even crossing a state line. They would move just 30 miles north of Rockville, Maryland, where they had raised two daughters, to Frederick — a town of about 65,000 on the outskirts of the Washington-Baltimore metro area near the Catoctin Mountains.