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.

Here’s an article we recently mailed to our clients, addressing some of the topics that might also be on your mind:

EDITOR’S NOTE:  Why don’t many of the brightest people on Wall Street, and the people who take their advice, succeed in beating the market? And, why are exchange traded funds, with all their low-cost advantages, a dangerous thing for many investors? 

EDITOR’S NOTE:  Wall Street is filled with highly paid and highly educated workaholics focused on beating the market. Many of them publish newsletters with specific advice, but more often than not, that advice doesn’t do the job. Why? 

Lots of people talk about buying and holding as the best investment approach. But not all of them practice buying and holding as I see it. Here are some thoughts I shared recently with listeners on a Sound Investing podcast. For convenience, I’ve organized this as a list of 10 ideas, but many of them affect each other, and sometimes one blends into another.

When you reach retirement, four major decisions will determine the bulk of your financial future. This article is about two of those decisions:

•    How much income do you need or want from your retirement portfolio?
•    Do you need a fixed stream of income you can count on, or can you tolerate cash flow that goes up and down depending on the success of your investments?

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 2009, Paul Merriman shows how to get this important equation right.