The author has had over 25 years in mutual fund investing. He favors Small Cap Mutual Funds over Large Cap Mutual Funds. To prove his case, he shows year by year, the average total returns in each of these categories for the years 1999 through 2010. The average total yearly returns were provided by Lipper. Small Cap Value and Blend funds returned 9.0% and 8.1% respectively and were clearly superior to the abysmal returns for Large Cap Value and Blend funds, 3.5% and 2.5% respectively, even when continued through the 2000 and 2008 recessions. Later, the author illustrates comparisons of outcomes over 25 year periods with various investment returns using a hypothetical initial investment of $5,000 and assuming monthly contributions which add another $5,000 per year. In order to safeguard assets at the onset of recessions, he examines easily accessible online private and governmental monthly reports. By using such reports, investors shouldn't hesitate to move their assets to Money Market Funds. Such action will prevent prevent serious erosion of accumulated assets and improve long term investment returns. He is critical of the very limited choices of funds available in 401k and 403b plans compared to those open to IRA investors. However, investors could be in both types of plans. For individuals comtemplating or are already in IRA plans, the author favors using Morningstar to guide their selections. Monitoring their portfolio with Quicken or its equivalent, investors in IRAs using Morningstar's ranking system, have the opportunity to increase their returns by 3% or more over fund averages. Over time, this difference can greatly enhance total retirement assets. The author is a former CEO of a metal stamping company. He is married with two children. Education: B.A.Manchester University, England.

Charlie Emery has been an active, self-taught investor for over twenty years. He has invested in his 401K plan at work as well as regular and Roth IRAs. He has learned the hard way, by trial and error, what does and doesn't work. Building on that experience, You Can Do It Yourself Investor's Guide seeks help today's working investor, most of whom will not have a traditional pension plan to fall back on when they retire.

If you are familiar with or willing to learn to work with a spreadsheet program like Excel; you can chart your own investments effectively. By spending a few hours each week managing your own investments and following a disciplined plan of action for your investments, you can plan for your long-term financial health. Emery also provides a top-down plan for the ETF investor who doesn't have a lot of time or money to spend managing their portfolio, along with a bottom-up plan that takes a little more time, but offers better rewards. This helpful guide can help you make your way past the financial planners and investment advisors who promise you big returns, but rarely deliver on their promises.

You can manage your own investments and plan your financial future effectively. The time to start is now.

People, as a rule, will work hard within cultural common sense and just assume that all will go well. But, "right now, 90 million Americans are faced with the most critical investment challenges of their lives." They are not prepared and are unsure how they will support themselves when they retire. That cultural common sense must not be working. Financial advisors are taught to advise the majority of people. The median household income in this country is $46,000 a year. Financial institutions are organized around acquiring the masses as clients. The clients of Sound Financial Group are the top 10% households as defined by annual income and net worth. We are committed to building a firm that will help our clients in areas that matter to them most. Many of our clients have questions like: Am I making the best use of the dollars I am saving?Will I be able to retire and be okay given I may live 25-30 years in retirement? Am I exposed to losing a great deal of my wealth or income if I were to be sued?When I leave this earth what kind of impact will I leave behind? Sound Financial Group was created as a result of its founder realizing that many people feel as though they have been taken advantage of when meeting with a traditional financial advisor. Often these people are pushed toward a set of pre-packaged investments that aren't tailored to their desires. These potential clients can feel they have lost control of their money and aren't involved in the process. We offer a process that gives our clients the tools to succeed and supplies them with the guidance on achieve a GOOD LIFE FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE.

I consider myself to be the luckiest guy in the world because I'm living the life I want to live. I'm 70 years old. I'm still involved in a career I love and I've been able to structure that career so I can stay in as long as I wish. It allows me to take time to stay healthy, travel, and follow-up on hobbies and things that I'm passionate about. This is the result of a four-step planning process that I began 15 years ago.

The New Retirement Paradigm

Know yourself.
Define your ideal work life.
Define your vision of your "play" life.
Arrange your financial infrastructure to be able to have the life you want.

How do you finance twenty, thirty or more years in retirement? For over twenty-five years, Kevin Bourke has helped seniors and retirees manage this challenging issue. With this book, he will share some of his secrets to making your money last as long as you do. If you're a senior or retiree, or soon to be one, you may have asked questions like these: I'm retired, how much can I afford to spend? Should I help my children financially? How can I find a good financial advisor? How much risk can I afford to take with my investments? Inside, you'll find helpful answers to these and other questions. With this knowledge, you'll be able to face your financial future with confidence. Filled with useful insights, Make Your Money Last a Lifetime may be the most valuable book you ever purchase."

Revised and Updated: Find out why conventional retirement wisdom fails to address the new, game-changing realities and learn to think differently about your retirement. Take steps to shelter your dreams from the coming "perfect storm" headed for America's retirement system: The retirement of the baby boom generation, increased life expectancy, and the rise of 401(k) plans means old definitions no longer apply. Develop the tools that will allow you to redefine retirement in a way that accounts for these new challenges. Break through outdated ways of thinking about retirement with Robert Krakower's practical and unflinching guide to the risks and opportunities awaiting anyone who wants a winning retirement plan in the 21st century. Written for the layperson in plain and simple language, Redefining Retirement for a New Generation exposes the hazards to a secure retirement that the financial media continues to gloss over. The book is a generational call to arms for anyone worried about the impact of current trends on the retirement system in general and his/her own retirement plans in particular. Get behind the scenes of the mutual fund industry, and discover the real reason why mutual funds perform so poorly. Apply the 401(k) plan checklist to your own employer's retirement plan and see how it stacks up against the ideal plan. Understand the pros and cons of the "buy-and-hold" slogan for modern retirement investing, and take control of your retirement as a member of the new generation.

Nonfinancial Defined Contribution (NDC) schemes are now in their teens. The new pension concept was born in the early 1990s, implemented from the mid-1990s in Italy, Latvia, Poland and Sweden, legislated most recently in Norway and Egypt and serves as inspiration for other reform countries. This innovative unfunded individual account scheme created high hopes at a time when the world seemed to have been locked into a stalemate between piecemeal reforms of ailing traditional defined benefit schemes and introducing pre-funded financial account schemes. The experiences and conceptual issues of NDC in its childhood were reviewed in a prior anthology (Holzmann and Palmer, 2006). This new anthology published in 2 volumes serves to review its adolescence and with the aim of contributing to a successful adulthood. Volume 1 on Lessons, Issues, Implementation includes a detailed analysis of the experience and the key policy lessons in the old and new pilot countries and general thoughts around the implementation of NDCs in other countries, including Chile, Greece and China. Volume 2 on Gender, Politics, Financial Stability includes deeper and new analyses of these issues that found limited or no attention in the 2006 publication. The key policy conclusions include: (i) NDC schemes work well (as documented by the experience of Italy, Latvia, Poland and Sweden during the crisis) but there is room to make them work even better; (ii) Go for an immediate transition to the new scheme to avoid future problems; (iii) Identify the legacy costs and their explicit financing during the transition as they will hit you otherwise soon; (iv) Adopt an explicit stabilizing mechanism to guarantee solvency; (v) Establish a reserve fund to guarantee liquidity; (vi) Elaborate an explicit mechanism to share the systemic longevity risk; and, last but not least; (vii) Address the gender implications of NDC with deeper analysis and open political discourse.

It is highly likely that the sale of your business is not going to provide for 100 percent of the earning power that you have received from your business. It's also true that most business owners have unrealistically optimistic ideas concerning the sale value of their business. So how do you, a business owner, prepare for financial independence and a secure retirement? How do you make your business worth more to others so that it's worth more to you? One way is through the Podolny Method, a logical, step-by-step program for initiating real change in your business. First, it helps you determine what you really want. It answers the questions: Why are you in business? What do you expect personally from your business, both now and when your ownership ends and you move on to the next phase of your life? Michael Podolny's eight-step method will help you establish where your business is and how your business works for or against your personal requirements. Most importantly, The Podolny Method provides you with the tools to initiate and sustain the changes that need to take place if you are to make your business to serve you.