Retirement

Gasoline prices are keeping up their record-setting ways. California drivers paid an average of $4.358 for a gallon of regular gasoline, up 6.6 cents from a week earlier, the Energy Department said Monday. That's a fresh record high for this time of year and is 48.4 cents above the year-earlier price. Nationally, the average rose 7.2 cents to $3.793, also a record for this week, according to Energy Department statistics. A year earlier, the average U.S. price was 27.3 cents lower.

Blue Shield of California's longtime chairman and chief executive, Bruce Bodaken, will retire at year's end, punctuating a career marked by praise for his early support of universal health coverage and criticism of his company's repeated rate hikes. Bodaken, 60, will leave at the end of December, and Paul Markovich, 45, currently chief operating officer at the nonprofit health insurer, will take over as CEO. The San Francisco company's 10-member board will elect a new, independent chairman this year.

LAS VEGAS — At the end of a tough, long night, Floyd Mayweather Jr. was left staring at a June 1 jail sentence and a boxing landscape that he seems to believe cannot deliver another quality opponent. The unbeaten 35-year-old champion late Saturday said he's leaning "80-20" toward retirement. "If it was my last fight, I gave them a bang," Mayweather (43-0) said after his unanimous-decision (118-110, 117-111, 117-111) triumph over Puerto Rico's Miguel Cotto (37-3) at the MGM Grand.

SACRAMENTO — The California State Teachers' Retirement System will cast its 5.3 million shares of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. against the reelection of the company's board after allegations of bribery in the retailer's Mexican operations. Citing "a breakdown of corporate governance and lack of oversight," Jack Ehnes, chief executive of CalSTRS, made the announcement Tuesday "CalSTRS believes former and current Wal-Mart executives and board members breached their fiduciary responsibilities," Ehnes said.

The Senate voted Friday to delay for 60 days the implementation of ethics regulations that several federal officials have blamed for their decisions to retire early. The delay, passed by unanimous consent, is expected to go to the House for a vote Monday, said a spokeswoman for Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio), who sponsored the measure at the Bush Administration's request. The regulations, which would have taken effect Tuesday without the delay, were cited as a reason for this week's retirement of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's acting chief of the space station program, Thomas L. Moser.

Dear Liz: I graduated from college last summer and was lucky enough to get full-time employment. However, I have a great deal of college debt, including private and federal loans. Are there government programs that help pay back college loan debt? Do you have any suggestions? I cringe at the thought of paying double what I owe over the life of the loan because of interest and want to get this debt under control in the next few years instead of 15. Answer: Your eagerness to pay off your student loan debt is admirable and is particularly appropriate when it comes to your private student loans.

Outraging the education community, Texas is considering allowing a large financial firm to take out life insurance on retired teachers, cafeteria workers and bus drivers. A state retirement plan would be the beneficiary of the policies, the financial firm would make millions on the transaction, and families of the retirees would get nothing. Former U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm, now an executive at UBS Investment Bank of New York, is promoting the proposal.

Gilbert Robles retired as a state parole agent at age 53, able to collect a $101,195 annual pension — 94% of his final salary. Last year, six months after he retired, the Arcadia resident accepted a political appointment with the same agency that pays an additional six figures. Scott Hallabrin took retirement as the top attorney for the state's ethics agency on June 29, 2009. The next day, he went back to the same post, as he prepared to watch his pension checks roll in on top of a salary.

Aging members of America's middle class worry about retirement, and for good reason. When the TV talking heads aren't reminding us about plummeting house prices, they're speculating about not whether but by how much politicians will cut Social Security and Medicare benefits. And the financial and economic crises of the last several years have left the country 10% poorer, obliterating $6.1 trillion in wealth, a healthy chunk of which was in retirement savings. The country's financial crisis came at a particularly bad time.

California Supreme Court Justice Edward A. Panelli said Thursday he is strongly considering retiring but will not announce a decision until early September. In an interview with The Times in his spacious court office here, the affable Deukmejian appointee described much of his job as an unrelenting grind that leaves little time for family or recreation. Though he is leaning toward retirement, Panelli said he wants to mull it over more before deciding whether to leave his prestigious post.

Kerry Wood arrived in the majors 14 years ago, a fresh-faced kid with No. 34 on his back, slinging fastballs at 100 mph, delivering breaking pitches that were often unhittable and striking out 20 batters in just his fifth start. On Friday, he left the game after one final, emotional appearance with the Chicago Cubs. Fittingly, "Kid K" struck out the last batter he'll ever face and retired at 34, ending a career that was eye-popping at times but hampered by injuries.

A retired LAPD homicide detective was arrested this week in the fatal beating of his wife in Hawaii six years ago. He had been a suspect since her death. Dan DeJarnette, 59, was taken into custody without incident Monday night at his home on the Big Island in connection with the slaying of his wife, Yu Dejarnette. He appeared in a Hawaii courtroom Tuesday to face formal charges. He said at the time of her November 2006 death that he had awakened and found her lying on a lava embankment about 20 feet from the couple's home in Ka'u on the southern end of the island.

Two retired Los Angeles County sheriff's supervisors painted a violent picture of life inside Men's Central Jail on Monday, recounting tales of deputies beating prisoners, ignoring bosses, forming cliques and engaging in off-duty misconduct. The former sergeant and lieutenant, who both retired in 2007, told a county jail commission that they felt their efforts to discipline wayward deputies were undermined by a top manager they accused of ordering supervisors to "coddle" young deputies in the jail.

California's energy grid operator announced that two mothballed generators at a natural-gas-powered plant on the Huntington Beach coastline are back in service, a critical piece of the plan to replace power from the shuttered San Onofre nuclear power plant this summer. San Onofre has been shut down for three months because of equipment issues, and it's unclear when it will return to operation. Officials have expressed concern that in the event of a heat wave or transmission outage, parts of Los Angeles County, south Orange County and San Diego County could face power shortages over the summer without the plant's 2,200 megawatts of energy.

Carroll Shelby, the charismatic Texan who parlayed a short-lived racing career into a specialized business building high-performance, street-legal cars, died Thursday. He was 89. Shelby died at Baylor Hospital in Dallas, according to an announcement by his company, Carroll Shelby Licensing. A cause was not disclosed. He led a colorful, outsized life that touched virtually every corner of the automotive world, said Leslie Kendall, curator of the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles.

The gig: Mike Alfred is co-founder and chief executive of BrightScope Inc., a financial information company in San Diego that analyzes 401(k) retirement plans and publishes disciplinary records and other information on financial advisors. The company rates 46,000 retirement plans, assigning each a numerical ranking from 0 to 100. The ratings are available free on its website, at http://www.brightscope.com . Alfred, 30, started the company with his younger brother, Ryan, and another partner.

Ernest Gustafson, who administered the largest amnesty program in the country as Los Angeles district director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, said he will retire in March. A successor has not been named. The once-obscure office became a hot seat when the Immigration Reform and Control Act was signed into law in 1986, and the five-county INS district processed 1,179,000 amnesty applications--44% of the nationwide total.

The National Education Assn. faces a federal lawsuit accusing it of breaching its duty to members by recommending a high-cost retirement plan in exchange for millions of dollars from the managers of the plan. The suit, which seeks class-action status, was filed by two of the 57,000 schoolteachers who the suit says invested $1 billion in a so-called 403(b) retirement plan endorsed by the NEA.

Dear Liz: After working all out for 28 years in a small business, I have put away $2.6 million in stocks, bonds and some cash. (I am a reasonably smart investor.) I'm 58 and want to be done at 60. I'm not tired of my business, just tired of working. How much do you think I could draw out and not get myself into trouble? I'm in great health, so I could last 30 more years. Our house is paid off, and my wife gets about $40,000 a year from a nice pension. Any ideas? Answer: Financial planners typically recommend an initial withdrawal rate of 3% to 4% of your portfolio.

LAS VEGAS — At the end of a tough, long night, Floyd Mayweather Jr. was left staring at a June 1 jail sentence and a boxing landscape that he seems to believe cannot deliver another quality opponent. The unbeaten 35-year-old champion late Saturday said he's leaning "80-20" toward retirement. "If it was my last fight, I gave them a bang," Mayweather (43-0) said after his unanimous-decision (118-110, 117-111, 117-111) triumph over Puerto Rico's Miguel Cotto (37-3) at the MGM Grand.