Evan Cooper writes that investing is less relevant to a comfortable retirement than most people think.

Appropriate levels of saving and spending are the real drivers of adequate retirement resources.

Not necessarily something that the asset management and accumulation industry wants to acknowledge, but the views expressed make perfect sense.

Henry "Bud" Hebeler is a former Boeing executive who has been running a retirement planning company for over twenty years.

His company, Analyze Now (www.analyzenow.com), provides information and tools that help individuals with retirement planning.  The company has helped thousands of people and is well respected among journalists and industry observers.

Warren Buffett commented on the likelihood of future inflation during the most recent Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder meeting and in his most recent shareholder letter.

Buffett’s advice for protecting against inflation involves two options:

The Business Week article on retirement is interesting and it makes sense that people should have access to alternative forms of financial planning.

The hard part about the article is actually putting life-cycle investing to work in real life. Who has the ability to know what their income and consumption is going to look like for 30 years? It just seems like a nice theory that is unrealistic in practice.

Zvi Bodie is absolutely one of the most honest and refreshing voices in finance and economics.  Professor Bodie also happens to be an advocate of life-cycle investing.

Business Week just ran a timely cover story on the post-financial crisis retirement landscape.  Portions of the feature present a remarkable contradiction. While there is a clear endorsement of life-cycle investing as a post-financial crisis retirement planning alternative, most of the actual discussion and recommendations are based on conventional approaches—asset accumulation, diversification, asset allocation with relatively heavy exposure to market risk, precautionary savings, and draw-down rates.

Life-cycle investing has been around for many years.

Zvi Bodie is one of the most articulate and visible advocates.  His book "Worry Free Investing" lays-out the fundamentals and makes a case for the life-cycle approach to investing.