A major concern of many people is whether their savings will last for their entire retirement. If the savings do last, it’s a success, but if the savings don’t last it could be considered a failure.

Key factors which influence whether savings will last for your entire retirement include the size of your portfolio at retirement (bigger is better), the amount of periodic withdrawals (the lower the withdrawals the greater the chance of not running out of money) and longevity (the longer you live, the more you need at the start of retirement).

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Setting aside money for college education can be a complex endeavor for many families. But some of today’s options are much better than those of yesteryear. In this article, we examine the cream of the crop of tax-sheltered 529 savings plans.

We are always looking for ways to better design client investment portfolios. Every year, we are bombarded with new investment approaches, new products and new trading strategies to beat the market. Most new products can be tossed aside immediately, but a few require more detailed investigation.

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Editor's Note: This article first appeared at Merriman.com in February, and was recently featured in our email newsletter. To get the latest educational articles, please visit the Merriman Blog or subscribe to our newsletter. 

If you are a serious investor, this article could be one of the most important things you’ll ever read. I’m going to show you the strategy that’s very close, though not quite identical, to the way we manage the majority of the money we invest for our clients.

Editor's Note: This article first appeared at Merriman.com in February, and was recently featured in our email newsletter. To get the latest educational articles, please visit the Merriman Blog or subscribe to our newsletter. 

Perhaps the biggest job that any investor has is managing risk. If you take too much, you could be flirting with disaster; if you take too little, you could cheat yourself out of the returns you need to take care of yourself, your family and your heirs. In this article, updated to include results from 2010, Paul Merriman shows how to get this important equation right.

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“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

With bond yields so low, is it a good idea to substitute dividend-paying stocks for bonds? Some would say yes, since dividend-paying stocks yield more than some bonds, and have more upside potential.

Commodity prices are rising again, led by sugar, copper, corn, wheat, and silver. Demand from emerging countries is the typically-stated reason, with an assist given to the Federal Reserve recently announcing a second round of quantitative easing (a euphemism for printing money).

EDITOR’S NOTE: Early this summer, Paul Merriman interviewed Knight Kiplinger, a highly respected financial journalist, for a Sound Investing podcast. This article contains excerpts from their discussion of the economy, inflation, interest rates, target-date retirement funds, investor psychology and prospects for dealing with government debt.

In an ideal world, employees could set up their retirement fund allocations and then forget them for years. But when plan options change as they recently did for workers at Boeing, new choices are necessary.

Here’s an article we recently mailed to our Merriman clients, addressing some inflation questions that we felt our FundAdvice readers may also be interested in:

Some investors are concerned about the prospect of future inflation, based on fiscal and monetary measures the U.S. government has taken to respond to the recent market crisis. However, other metrics suggest that moderate inflation will continue. These include current inflation, bond market indicators and worldwide excess capacity.