Dear Young Friend: Retirement Savings Can Reduce Taxes

If you’re looking for a “set it and forget it” solution for choosing and managing your investments, target date retirement accounts are the closest you’ll get. But as with any investment, understand it before you buy it.

The value of most investments changes every day. Over time, they can get seriously out of what compared to the allocation of stocks, bonds, and cash that you started with. If your account custodian offers automatic rebalancing, that can make it much easier to get things back to where they should be.

Index funds can make choosing investments easier. In addition, their low costs mean that they typically out-perform actively managed funds.

When you think about passing assets to others upon your death, you probably think first of a will. In reality, a will only controls assets that aren't transferred by any one of several other mechanisms, including beneficiary, POD and TOD designations.

Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) let you set aside money tax-free to cover deductibles and out of pocket health care expenses when you have a High Deductible Health Plan (HDHP). Distributions used to pay health care expenses are also tax=free.