The Secret That Will Help You Afford Retirement

Retirement can be an expensive path to happiness, and given that the average retirement savings of workers in their fifties and sixties is about $100,000, 30 years may be too long to be retired. To live long and prosper, we'll need to be creative, inventive, and resilient. Read here for the secrets that will help you afford retirement.

Please keep reading below for this month's selection of helpful blog posts and articles on retirement. Once again, I'm including articles on investing to help you stay the course during this volatile market.

Investing - The Behavior Gap    

If it's true that a picture is worth a thousand words, then fellow CBS MoneyWatch blogger Allan Roth has a treat for you. According to his review of Carl Richard's upcoming book The Behavior Gap: Simple Ways to Stop Doing Dumb Things with Money, Richards manages to illustrate some very complicated issues about people's relationship with money with some very simple diagrams. Read on to see some of Roth's favorite -- and insightful -- diagrams in Richard's new book.     

How to Play This Volatile Market

The extreme market volatility can play havoc on our emotions. As Allan Roth said recently in an article in The Wall Street Journal, it also creates a great opportunity for those who can play it correctly. Read here for details.

Brad Barber and Terrance Odean have conducted a series of well-received studies on investing and human behavior. Larry Swedroe, a fellow CBS MoneyWatch blogger, reviews their most recent study.

There's an overwhelming body of evidence on the inability of financial forecasters to make accurate predictions. This inability is one reason why efforts to outperform the market without taking more risk have failed with such persistence. This is true for both the stock and the bond markets. The following post from Larry Swedroe is a recent example that shows while it might be easy to make a living selling forecasts, it's very difficult for even the experts to make accurate forecasts.

A recent paper has called into question the generally accepted rule that four percent is the amount you can safely withdraw from IRAs, 401(k) accounts, and retirement savings to generate reliable, lifetime retirement income in today's economic environment. Read here for details.

Brave (and Smart) Workers Increasing 401(k) Savings Despite Recession Concerns

Which is a better method of generating retirement income from your retirement savings? Should you buy an immediate annuity or use managed payouts? Read here for a comparison of how much income you can generate from each method, plus a discussion of the pros and cons of each.

Choosing when and how to claim your Social Security benefits can make or break a retirement. At last, there's software that can help you make this important decision and find a financial planner who knows about strategies to optimize your decision. Get more details here.

Here's a great story that illustrates the need to investigate on your own any type of investment, whether it's an annuity or a mutual fund product. Don't invest in them simply because your friends are doing it. If you do your homework now, you'll thank yourself later.