Retirement Planning: How to Do It Right

Planning for a retirement that might last 30 years or more -- and relying mostly on your accumulated financial resources to do so -- is an ambitious task. You'll need to take some time to do the job right. Here's my 12-week, step-by-step guide that summarizes my recent series of posts; it's basically a self-guided tutorial on retirement planning.

Please continue reading for this month's selections of helpful blog posts and articles on retirement.

How to Feel Confident About Your Retirement   

There's only one sure way you're going to feel confident about your financial security in retirement: Have a detailed, written plan for how you'll generate retirement income. Read here for details, including the key ingredients of a basic plan.

Much of the academic evidence against active management points to the underperformance of individual funds. But you can have losers in your portfolio as long as the winners make up the difference. Read on for an example of the odds of active portfolios outperforming, from this excellent post by fellow CBS MoneyWatch blogger Larry Swedroe.

The market jump we've experienced during the past few years has shown that, once again, investors just can't time the market. Learn more in this recent post from Larry Swedroe.

Want some free and useful advice on how to generate retirement income? Just pick up a copy of a recent, comprehensive report on how to generate retirement income, issued by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). The recommendations will be familiar to regular readers of my columns. Or read here for a summary.

Don't let the bad rap generated by deferred annuities stop you from considering immediate annuities when you retire. They can have an important place in your retirement income portfolio. Read here for details.   

Many retirement calculators do an adequate job of helping you decide how much to save when retirement is far in your future, say, when you're in your 20s, 30s, and 40s. When you get to your late 50s or early 60s, however, and you're trying to figure out exactly how and when you'll retire, you'll need more precision. And that's when many retirement calculators come up short. Read here to learn how to overcome five common flaws of retirement calculators.

Just a quick note: This is a multi-page blog post - please be sure to click through to read all the pages. 

Career reinvention was a big buzzword among many baby boomers even before the economy crashed in 2008. Now, tough new economic realities have transformed career reinvention from a virtue into a necessity for millions of older Americans who aren't ready to retire or simply can't afford to quit working. Read here for some excellent ideas and insights from Mark Miller's recent column on his website RetirementRevised.

7 Habits of Highly Effective Financial Gurus

Ever wonder how stock gurus always look brilliant on TV? Here are the seven techniques they use to give the illusion of brilliance, from an entertaining post by Allan Roth.