Retirement

Nearly 45 percent of U.S. households are "at risk" of not having enough to maintain their living standards in retirement, according to the National Retirement Risk Index, a special project of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

Financial-services firms are invitations to use their retirement-planning calculators. You'd be wise to ignore that offer.

With the economy and the markets showing tentative signs of a rebound, millions of Americans are focusing on their 401(k) plans with fingers crossed, hoping to make up the estimated $3.7 trillion employees’ retirement accounts lost during the crash.

It's illegal for employers to discriminate based on age. But age bias is widely acknowledged to be a key factor in job loss and hiring practices - something that should be painfully obvious to even a casual reader of newspapers, which routinely run articles about laid-off midlife workers.

Laurie Orlov grew up in the corporate high-tech world, working for 30 years as an information technology executive and later as an analyst for Forrester Research, the respected technology research company.

While retirement investors have had a miserable time lately, tax season is always a good time to do some long-term planning.