Investors who are organized and have a clear understanding of what they’re trying to accomplish are far more likely to succeed than those who are casual about their money. One of the most effective ways to make investing easy and methodical is to develop a personal policy statement that answers basic questions and issues that come up repeatedly.

Regular readers of this newsletter know I believe in discipline, and one of the most productive practices I follow every year is listing ways I can make myself a better investor and make my money work harder for me and my family.

Government regulators have uncovered a giant mutual fund scandal in which millions of investors have lost millions of dollars. But investors lose much more money than this every year at the hands of people they trust to give them financial advice. This article tells why those losses occur and how investors can avoid or minimize them.

Editor’s Note: Late in September, Paul Merriman, editor and publisher, met with the Merriman investment advisors to share ideas on how to persuade investors to make changes that will bring them more success. This issue of FundAdvice.com is an edited transcript of that round-table conversation.  Participants included Jeff Merriman-Cohen, Cheryl Curran, and former financial advisors Ed Ward and Jim Whipps.

In an article called “Retirement: When Your Portfolio Starts Paying You”, we told retirees that less can be more. If you withdraw less from your portfolio in the early years of retirement, you can take out more later. That might seem obvious.

The end goal for most investors is achieving a successful and satisfying retirement. The most important work we do is helping people reach that goal. In an article that’s been published on FundAdvice.com for several years, Paul Merriman distills all he has learned into 10 steps that investors can take to make their “golden” years as good as possible.

Hulbert Financial Digest, which has been tracking the recommendations of investment newsletters for 21 years, has issued its latest rankings of the best and worst performances of 2002.

If you’re a typical investor, you own at least a few individual stocks. If you work for a public company, you probably own some stock in it.

This article is written with do-it-yourself (DIY) investors in mind. For nearly 20 years, we’ve done our best in our articles to give readers the knowledge they need to make the right decisions on their own, without paying professionals for unnecessary advice and hand-holding.

We are often asked why we recommend investors keep half their equities in international funds. But we never hear that question from readers who took this article to heart when it was last updated in 2003.