Psst! Did you know that Uncle Sam has saved up $1 million for your retirement? Sounds crazy, but that’s the net effect of a typical couple’s earnings. A fully retired worker in 2013 can expect $2,533 a month, the government estimates. Over a year, that’s $30,396. Throw in benefits from a part-time income earned by… Continue reading →

The Internet is known for “rolling up” inefficient businesses. Email has supplanted the postal service. Online entertainment, including gaming, is eating into traditional TV and cable. Now education is under pressure — in a good way. For starters, retirement courses online make planning easier than ever, and virtually free to all. The new online learning model… Continue reading →

If you read the work of pop economists these days, everything and everyone is rational — even if the outcomes make no sense. Take men and women. How have we, collectively as humans, managed to evolve into the dominant global species? The economist’s answer is rational division of labor: Some of our distant ancestors sent… Continue reading →

Regular readers of my column here likely recall that I recently wrote about the move by the California state retirement plan toward retirement indexing over active management. It will take the Calpers system, which manages several hundred billion in retirement funds, some time to make this kind of change — but things will change. For… Continue reading →

When the world’s 12th-largest economy makes a big decision about its finances, you tend to notice. That’s what California is, budget problems aside. Now its state employees retirement fund, CalPERS, is on its way toward quitting the active investing game. Not quitting the markets. Just dropping all pretense that beating the market is a worthwhile… Continue reading →

Is your retirement ready for the next big market crash? What if I told you it doesn’t matter? It doesn’t — if you are properly invested. One of the major lessons learned from the 2008 debacle is that people who remained in the market and avoided panicking came out of things just fine. Clearly, some… Continue reading →

Here’s a smattering of recent headlines. See if you can find rhyme or reason in them, at least in terms of actions you might take — right now, today — in regard to your retirement investing. After-hours buzz: TI, IBM, Best Buy & more Brace for ‘more choppiness,’ strategist says Sell crude on Obama’s Syria… Continue reading →

When working people enter their late 50s or early 60s, most begin to take stock — many for the first time — of their retirement plan investments. Often, they are shocked to find that the reality underlying their plan to fund retirement is dire, even catastrophic. Now, this is not an article to scold savers who… Continue reading →

Better returns can’t be explained any more simply: If you worry about the pennies, the dollars take care of themselves. Often used to explain budgeting, the old adage applies very well to investing, too. That is, if you can keep your cost of retirement investing to a minimum, you will have more money in the… Continue reading →