WE’RE WORTH SO MUCH more than the value of our homes and our financial accounts. But how much more? Forget your car and household possessions. Unless you have a Chagall hanging in the living room, it’s safe to assume all this stuff will depreciate and eventually be worth little or nothing.
Instead, our three assets with potentially significant value are our regular paycheck, our Social Security retirement benefit and any traditional employer pension we’re entitled to.

SAVING ENOUGH FOR retirement, and then turning those savings into a reliable stream of retirement income, together constitute our life’s great financial task. Want to make sure you’re on track? Here are 10 questions to ask:

Are you shortchanging your retirement by devoting too much of your income to other goals? For instance, can you truly afford private school for the kids? Do you really have the financial wherewithal to buy a second home?

WHEN AN INVENTOR goes on record stating that his invention is “a monster” that he’d like to “blow up,” you know there’s a problem.
Such is the case with Ted Benna, who back in 1980 created the first 401(k) retirement plan. Since then, his invention has grown to become the dominant retirement vehicle for millions of Americans.
Why is Benna so negative on his creation? The problem, in a word: complexity. According to Benna,

I CELEBRATED MY 50th birthday a few weeks ago. Since then, I’ve found myself spending a lot of time thinking about numbers. Specifically, I’ve been musing about when I might be able to retire from my current fulltime job. Age 55, 58, 62? Or will it need to be later?
Several studies suggest the age at which most people leave the workforce has been steadily rising over the past several decades. This is likely due,

IN THE 1990S, WHEN I started working fulltime, conventional wisdom suggested two possible routes to a comfortable retirement: Find a public sector job that offered a traditional pension plan or, alternatively, join the private sector and set aside 10% of my salary each year in my employer’s 401(k) plan. I was led to believe that if I followed either recommendation, I could sit back, let compound interest do its magic and achieve a financially secure retirement.

IF WE WORK LIKE dogs for 40 years, we’ll get our reward, which is the chance to sit around and do nothing for 20 or 30 years. That’s the definition of a successful life, according to conventional financial wisdom. But it doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun, does it?
My contention: It’s time to rethink the crazy distinction between work and retirement and, in the process, redefine what counts as a successful life.

RETIREMENT MAY BE our final financial goal—chronologically speaking—but we should always put it first. Partly, that’s because retirement is so much more expensive than, say, buying a house or putting the kids through college, so it takes many decades of saving and investing to amass enough for a comfortable retirement. But among financial goals, retirement is also unique in two other ways: It isn’t optional—and we can’t pay for it out of current income.