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As the stock market resurgence continues, investors are reawakening to the performance benchmarks of their mutual funds to see if their fund choices are drawing every ounce of gains that have been produced over the last couple of years.

With the long financial nightmare of the recession and financial crisis shrinking in the memories of those who endured it, Americans are, once again, setting their sights on a shorter retirement time horizon.

It wasn’t long ago that financial planning was thought of as a discipline that only applied to the very wealthy.

With rising retirement costs, longer life spans, and the need to rely almost exclusively on one’s own assets for income, there is little margin for error in investing for retirement. When we’re talking about securing a comfortable income that needs to last as many as 25 or 30 years, mistakes made early on can be magnified to tragic proportions.

After costs, the return on the average actively managed dollar will be less than the return on the average passively managed dollar for any time period.
—William F. Sharpe, 1990 Nobel Laureate

While you may not think of it in this way, your investment in a mutual fund is actually a contract to hire a professional to manage your funds, just as if you had hired an individual portfolio manager. With investment management fees approaching 1.5%, there’s no need to be concerned if they are being paid enough.

Social Security was never intended to be an income source that could support you in retirement. Rather, its sole purpose was to provide a safety net for people who were unable to accumulate sufficient retirement savings.

Sadly, more than 55% of Americans die each year without a will; and while it’s understandable why the subject of death is not one people like to contemplate, if they actually knew what happens to their estate when they die “intestate” (without a will), they might reconsider their reluctance.

After market-risk and inflation-risk, which investors take great strides to mitigate through sound investment practices, taxation-risk presents the biggest obstacle to building wealth. A sound investment strategy not only seeks to generate returns on your capital, it also seeks to preserve as much of your capital as possible to keep it working for you.

For many Americans, building true wealth might seem elusive, even illusory considering that many people, who very recently were sitting on six and seven figure 401k plans and home equity values, now feel unprepared for retirement. The lessons learned from the financial crisis is that wealth can be fleeting.