Most everyone in the United States today knows about the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930s. The collapse must have been earned, some Americans reason, by the excesses of the Jazz Age in the 1920s when investors sought cheap thrills, lighting cigars with ten-dollar bills and drinking champagne from glass slippers. Were these frenetic pleasure seekers in the jazz age real Americans? They were not like us—not practical and sensible and putting family first. They had money to burn. They burned it. And they got burned. The 1920s and the Great Depression seem almost like a morality play: Investors should have been punished for burning money rather than spreading it out to those in need.

The stock market crash of 1987 looked quite different. Here were the sons and daughters of the Great Depression babies, the hippies who belatedly got jobs and started families and, okay, maybe they were getting cocky about earning big salaries, living high on the hog. But after all, it was their own money. They earned it, and with the "invention" of 401(k) plans by R. Theodore Benna (Ted), who designed the first one to open January 1, 1981, the baby boomers had every reason to learn about investing and to win big in these retirement plans. Investors affected by the crash of 1987 were us: our parents, our neighbors. All of these other Americans who were working hard, trying to make it. Did they deserve this harsh punishment? As it turned out, the investors burned in the 1987 crash hardly remembered it. The market rebounded so quickly that a decade later Americans were throwing everything they had into the market, borrowing money to buy stocks, day trading at the office, garnering bragging rights to show off at the Friday night cocktail hour.

When the tech bubble burst in March 2000, few of us could say that the market crash was someone else's fault. Most of us were caught up in it. Too many saw the stock market as a giant slot machine that spouted money no matter what you put in it, too many had stretched too far and were feeling giddy about the easy money to be made in day trading—truckers and caterers and teachers and all our other friends. Still, in the back of our minds we knew that we'd been warned. We knew that we'd been foolhardy. Time to suck it up and play the game conservatively. And how long did that last? The NASDAQ Index hit a high of 5,048 on March 10, 2000, and dropped to 1,114 on October 9, 2002.

So shouldn't we have seen it coming this time? What excuse do we have for 2008? Wall Street excesses? That contributed to the problem, sure, all the Wall Street firms and banks across the country that leveraged their balance sheets to load on risky debt. But individual excess contributed too. Why did all of us Americans continue to buy houses even as the housing market soared out of sight, when standard, three-bedroom, split-level homes were selling for more than half a million dollars? We should have known that the bubble had moved from tech stocks to real estate. In 2008, nobody was lighting his cigar with a ten-dollar bill. But lots of us were unrealistic and greedy.

This time there was no safe haven. And investors had no one to blame. It's easy to say that the other guy didn't keep his promises. But saying so didn't save any investments this time. Plenty of us happily participated in blowing this giant bubble. Students watched promised college aid packages go up in smoke. Colleges saw their operating funds frozen so they couldn't get the money they needed for day-to-day expenses. What should we have done differently? We shouldn't have borrowed so much. We shouldn't have leveraged so much. We should have been more careful. We should have kept informed. Next time we'd better be informed. It's time to stop looking back and asking ourselves whose fault it is. Who can we sue? How can we avoid taking responsibility for the fact that we lost our investments and savings? Of course, many investors were careful, saving prudently and investing conservatively. This time the markets surprised even professional investors.

Make no mistake about this one: we are all in it together. Sure, we can blame Congress for failing to save this or that company or banks for leaving distressed homeowners holding the bag for a home that's worth less than the mortgage to pay it off. Or we can blame advisors who urged us to get into the market. This is the same refrain we've been hearing since the 1970s: Why has my employer "downsized" me? Or "rightsized" me? Why have I lost my defined benefit plan? Why do I have to pay more for my own health care? Why am I the victim? Who can I sue? In 2008, everybody was a loser. Big pension funds and endowment funds—even at Harvard and Yale—sank dramatically in value. No one knew how to protect himself from the financial hail storm that ended 2008. The experts were no better off than you were. So let's dust ourselves off and move forward.

The right questions to ask are the following: How can I better take care of myself in a quickly changing world? How can I create the career I want, always willing to adjust as I learn more and gain experience? How can I live where I want to live? Learn more? Explore my passions? You could never count on a big corporation to do these things for you. You could never count on the government to do these things for you. Resting in someone else's large hands might mean you are protected to continue doing what they want you to do. It never meant you were free to do what you wanted to do.

Ten years ago, I wrote a book about 401(k) plans with great expectations. I hoped it would help readers squeeze the most value from their 401(k) plans, certainly. But the book had the ambition of going beyond that: it aimed to help you to think about how to use your capital to create the life you want for yourself along the way, as well as in retirement.

Back then, corporate America was restructuring radically, and many Americans were not included in the new plan. We'd experienced a booming stock market for eight years. Some investors were sitting on a pile of gains and feeling smug. But the story of the economic expansion certainly had not been one of prosperity for all Americans. The expansion masked a lot of pain. Thousands of workers felt that this period of economic growth was built on their broken backs. Behind the story of growth was the story of the severed employment contract. Gone was the promise that if you work hard, your employer will take care of you both as a worker and as a retiree. And that was a decade ago!

Rich is subjective. The 401(k) plan is a small but important tool for you to use; what you do with it depends on whether you view this glass as half empty or half full. To move toward independence, you must do some serious thinking about where you are going in your career and in your life and how your 401(k) plan might help you get there. Let's start with why the 401(k) plan was developed, where it came from, why it has grown, and how it works. Then we'll explore what that can mean for you both today and later in your nonworking years. In other words, rather than looking at your life divided into two parts—work and retirement—think of what you want to get out of it as a whole and start moving!

The massive corporate restructurings of the last two decades of the twentieth century probably seem like cruel punishment to some of the millions of people who were forced out of work and into lesser jobs. A growing chunk of the workforce is now employed as temporary or contract workers. These people have no employee benefits, which makes them a much cheaper source of labor for employers. They provide a vast pool of "just-in-time labor," holding down wages for others who do hold jobs. Of course, not all of these contract workers are unhappy with their jobs. Many see self-employment as freedom and wonder why it took them so long to find this life. Freedom is also subjective.

I once thought of freedom as defined by the Murray N. Burns character played by Jason Robards in the movie A Thousand Clowns. The clowns are the rest of us, the nondescript folks who tramp the streets of Manhattan or Chicago or Minneapolis on our way to work each morning at an insurance brokerage, ad agency, department store, bakery. Meanwhile, Robards' character looks out his window and laughs at the mindless clowns who work for a living while he plans his latest ruse to trick someone into paying him for loafing.

Moviegoers in the late 1960s cherished this movie. Freedom looked to be the only possible answer—the freedom to sing or paint or write or run through the park or sit in a coffee house and chat about existentialism. To the baby boomers, freedom meant going to rock concerts or debating anarchy versus nihilism or watching the Beatles' film The Yellow Submarine.

But look what happened to us freedom lovers: we began to weigh the value of what we thought of as freedom versus the freedom to buy a house and have a family. For most of us, the traditional life won out. We went back to school, became corporate lawyers and investment bankers and professors. We flung ourselves into our new bourgeois lives, earned a good deal of money, bought expensive houses and jewelry and vacations, imported European baby cribs and chocolates. It seemed that if we were going to work, we deserved the best. We'd given up our freedom after all.

But expensive does not equate with value, as the baby boomers soon learned. I met a man at my husband's high school class reunion who told me he was "a poet stuck in a lawyer's body." When I talk to financial advisors, they tell me most of their clients have enough money. What most of them can't seem to find is the magic potion that brings satisfaction or fullness to a life. So once again, we're looking for freedom.

One thing that I've learned in thirty years of writing about money is that the decisions people make are usually based on emotions rather than dollars and sense—that the unhappiness surrounding money comes not from how much money is available but how it is used. Most Americans fail to achieve what they could in life and fall short of realizing their dreams, not for lack of money but because they don't understand what they want their money to buy.

I once believed money might buy me the freedom to watch out the window while the clowns trekked to work. What I found is that money more often becomes an albatross. Getting married, buying a home, having or adopting a child, changing careers. Too often life passages bring not joy but a startling loss of freedom. Not the elusive potion that leads to happiness but more responsibilities, a tighter noose. So that we are left saying: "I have to buy this expensive piece of jewelry or take this expensive vacation because I deserve it, because I've worked so hard. Because I've lost my freedom." But what we really want is more balance in our lives.

So at the same time that I urge you to pay attention to your 401(k) plan and to squeeze it for all it's worth, I suggest that you take a look at the trajectory of your life, where it's going, where it's been. We all hear about people who are disappointed in retirement, depressed and regretful. The time to think about avoiding that is way before you get to retirement. I do a lot of work with financial advisors. Over the past decade, they have been telling me that what they see most often in affluent clients is that they feel they've sold their integrity or their dreams for a dollar.

Happily, financial advisors have responded to this search for value, for integrity, in their clients. Many of them have turned to what they call "life planning," by which they mean helping a client identify the passion in his life and then using his money to achieve it. Whether or not we use a financial planner, I think all of us should be looking at life planning rather than just planning to have enough dollars to eke out a paltry existence during retirement.

The planner who is generally given credit as the father of the life-planning movement is George Kinder, Harvard graduate, certified public accountant, bon vivant. "I think too much emphasis is placed on retirement planning to the exclusion of creating a happy life for yourself," says Kinder, who is also a Buddhist teacher.

Some years ago, Kinder took the Hawaiian vacation he had always dreamed about. Maui was everything he had expected and more. He discovered a different side of himself that he hadn't known existed in his buttoned-down life of the mind in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Spending more time in Hawaii became a top financial-planning goal and he stretched out his annual vacations to three and then four weeks. Still unsatisfied, he set up a financial-planning practice in Maui and began spending six months of the year there and six in Cambridge.

Kinder didn't stop there. He went on to sell his financial planning practice and set up the Kinder Institute for Life Planning where he offers workshops to help advisors work on life planning with their clients. I attended one of the workshops in the summer of 2008. I was so inspired that I felt everyone should be able to use these life exercises.

Kinder is perhaps best known for the "three questions" he recommends each person ask himself: "How would you live your life if you had all the money you needed? What would you do if you learned you had only five to ten years to live? What would you most regret if you had just twenty-four hours left?" In our workshop, after we'd written out answers to these questions, we went on to learn about what brings us anxiety and what brings us joy in our own experiences with money.

Although most participants—there were about twenty to thirty total—were financial planners, some from independent firms or large multi-family offices like GenSpring, others from small community banks or large global banks, each of us participated in the workshop as a personal experience first, one that opened our eyes to money disorders in our own lives. This made clear how crucial the preliminary step is to understand and clear away the obstacles before turning to the dollars and cents of planning.

We worked with partners, exploring how early money experiences shaped us or singed us. For example, Kinder had each member of the twosome practice telling a personal money story to the partner. The partner was not allowed to say anything during the story. Listening is a crucial part of what Kinder teaches. He cites a study that claims the time between the advisor's first question to the client: "Why are you here?" and the beginning of sales pitch about a product is eighty-two seconds on average. Not much time to get a flavor of the client's life. Listening proves critical.

One of the most impressive parts of Kinder's presentation is his focus on integrity, honesty, and personal freedom. He calls on us to act with integrity, from a place of wholeness and clarity, in regard to personal values. He urges us to "identify and face the places where you lack integrity regarding money and clean them up." Whether we believe money is fair at its base or unfair at its base, Kinder says, if we cling to one side and see all of life through that lens, we are trapped, excluded from adulthood, unable to achieve all we could in life.

He talks about the patterns of "resent, blame, and complain," which are more familiar to most of us than clarity and integrity around money. Who hasn't had a friend who can't move off the idea that Dad didn't leave him enough money and life is unfair, and that if only he'd received the inheritance, if only he'd been promoted on the job, if only his wife hadn't turned out to be such a spendthrift, things would be perfect now.

This is not a self-help book. I'm not going to talk about the power of positive thinking or scold you about debt or lecture you about paying yourself first. Still, I can't resist urging you to make the most of the tools that are available to you in order to improve your life. Inasmuch as you can view the revolution in the American work-place as an opportunity for you to create independence for yourself rather than seeing it as a cause for disappointment, you will certainly have a better work life and a better retirement life. The 401(k) plan can play a key role in helping you to do that.

To understand the role this plan plays in modern corporate American, it's helpful to take a look at its roots, which are to be found in this very same restructuring, in the plans of corporations to reduce their responsibility for employee benefits like pensions and health care coverage and other perks. It is a fascinating story of how one person helped shape the most vital savings tool many Americans have today.

Congress added paragraph k to section 401 of the Internal Revenue Code as part of the Revenue Act of 1978. But that paragraph might have gone unnoticed. Paragraph k simply permitted companies to set up tax-deferred savings plans so long as the plans didn't unduly favor the top-earning one-third of the company's employees. In other words, it provided for a "discrimination test." If an employee benefit is to receive a tax advantage, it must be offered (and used by) employees at various income levels. It may not unfairly advantage those employees in the higher ranks of the company, who are higher paid. This paragraph said that deferred savings plans must pass that test—nothing too remarkable about that.

There was a reason for addressing this issue in the tax bill, though. Paragraph k was actually written to resolve a conflict over cash profit-sharing plans that were prevalent among major companies in the early 1970s. Many companies had replaced year-end cash bonuses with plans that allowed employees to set aside a portion of the bonus in a tax-deferred account.

Tax deferral is always more appealing to those who make more money and pay more tax. (At the time, we had a series of different tax rates that peaked out at 70 percent.) Lower-paid workers are less likely to opt for tax deferral. They pay less tax and they have less money to stretch to meet their needs. Suppose a bank teller typically received an $800 bonus at Christmas time. Under the bank profit-sharing plans of the early 1970s, half of that would go into the retirement plan, and the teller could choose whether to defer the other half as well or to take that $400 in cash. This hybrid plan also typically allowed employees to withdraw money from the retirement plan after two years.

Although all workers had the same options, they didn't make the same choices. The higher-paid workers chose to defer their entire bonus while lower-paid workers typically chose half cash and then pulled the rest of the money out of the plan as soon as possible. The government objected to this arrangement because the tax benefit was really going to higher-paid employees who could afford to defer the income and get the advantage of pre-tax buildup of principal. The fact that everyone had the same opportunity was immaterial from the government's point of view because everyone did not get the same advantage from the tax deferral.

In 1972, the Internal Revenue Service ruled that no new hybrid bonus plans like these could be set up. Two years later, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), was passed. ERISA was landmark legislation, providing a massive body of rules and regulations to govern private pension plans and to protect the participants in them.

When ERISA was passed, Congress said that it would make a ruling on the hybrid plans. That happened in 1978 when paragraph k was written, stipulating that the plans could continue but only if the didn't favor the top one-third of employees. Paragraph k took effect in January 1980.

Like other benefits consultants, Ted Benna read paragraph k carefully. Even though it presented nothing really new, employee benefits consultants serve their clients by giving them opportunities to use government rules to make their benefits efficient and cost effective.

"The myth was that nobody knew it was there," Benna says. "But that wasn't true. I studied it and so did anyone else who follows this section of the law." But no one saw it as particularly significant. "January came and went and nobody was doing anything," Benna said. But he didn't drop it. He was working with a bank that wanted to revamp its traditional defined benefit pension plan and eliminate an old cash bonus plan. (Defined benefit plans get their name because the plan "defines" the benefit you will receive in retirement, based on your years of service, your salary and so forth. Funding the plan and paying out the benefit are the responsibilities of the employer.)

It was clear to Benna that section 401's paragraph k would permit his bank client to replace the cash bonus plan with a deferred profit-sharing plan, provided the new plan included lower-paid workers so that it would meet the discrimination test. But Benna didn't think lower-paid workers would participate. Why should they set aside part of their salary for later when they needed every penny right now? If they did not participate, the plan wouldn't pass the test and it would not be permitted by the government. "I'd worked with enough employees to know that the bulk of them wouldn't be willing to set aside a big chunk of pay for retirement just to save money on taxes," Benna says.

So Benna began to study paragraph k to see how he might interpret it to help his client include lower-paid workers in the retirement plan so that it would pass the test. He came up with two key concepts that made the 401(k) plan what it is today: he saw that the savings could come from regular salary rather than bonuses, and he came up with the idea of deducting contributions on a regular basis from each employee paycheck. More important, he developed the concept of employer matching funds, the key to the attractiveness of the 401(k) plans. "Neither of these was in the code," Benna says. "But I took the position that if something wasn't prohibited, you could do it."

As it turned out, his bank client didn't want to be a guinea pig and test an interpretation of the new law that hadn't been specifically laid out. So Benna's own employer, the Johnson Companies, set up the first 401(k) savings plan on January 1, 1981, as a test case. In November of that year, the Internal Revenue Service acknowledged that Benna's interpretation of paragraph k was an acceptable one.

The 401(k) plan took off almost immediately for one key reason: it allowed employers to begin shifting the immense responsibility for retirement savings to their employees. Critics see this as evil. Few of us can view the changes in corporate America over the last three decades without emotion because few of us have been untouched. But from a bird's-eye view, it was more pragmatic than evil. American companies were beginning to feel the heat of intense global competition. For many of them, it was cut costs or perish. Some of them may have done it heartlessly. But it is clear now that corporations needed to do what they could to cut costs. We live with the mixed results.

Today, 401(k) plans hold $3 trillion in assets on behalf of 50 million active participants and millions of former employees and retirees, according to the Investment Company Institute, the mutual fund trade association (www.ici.org/401k). And the plans are, in fact, the best investment around for employees who have the opportunity to use them, even taking into account the stock market disaster in 2008.

One troubling aspect of this popularity is that corporations have spent millions of dollars to persuade employees that 401(k) plans are wonderful. But no one is being paid to look for the negatives in these plans. In the first fifteen years of their existence, all the news about 401(k) plans was good news. The financial media can sound like a thundering herd, and the herd couldn't say enough good things about 401(k) plans. Further, the soaring balances in 401(k) plans feathered a lot of nests: the employer, of course, could set up pension plans more cheaply. The spectacular growth in mutual funds can be attributed largely to the existence of 401(k) plans. Consultants, marketers, magazines and newspapers that sold advertising, perhaps even journalists, were given a shot in the arm with all the money flowing into 401(k) plans.

Lots of material written about how great these plans are and how you could get the most out of them was paid for by vendors who sold the plans. One result of this publicity was that 401(k) plans became linked to America and apple pie. They were good. They were a benefit. They would help you reverse the trend of spending your dollars and show you how to save them for retirement. Not surprisingly, then, there was little objective criticism of these plans and too little objective educational material to help employees set up and manage their plans. The cost of the plans went up and employers passed those costs on to 401(k) plan participants with no employee advocate to criticize that move.

As the plans grew, problems emerged. Some employers have insisted that the employer's contribution be in the form of company stock—or, worse yet, that the employee contribution be in the form of company stock. Some employers give participants so few options it is not possible to set up a well-diversified portfolio. Or they set up plans that cost too much. The typical 401(k) plan evolved from a low-fee product that was sponsored by the employer, to a high-fee product, as employers have shifted expenses onto their employees. Because employees pay for them, the employer no longer has an incentive to keep expenses low.

Within the past decade, as flaws have been exposed, 401(k) plans no longer enjoy their once-rosy reputations. The danger of investing in company stock was demonstrated in 2001 when Enron, the seventh-largest U.S. corporation disappeared into bankruptcy almost overnight. About 58 percent of Enron's 401(k) assets were invested in Enron stock at the end of 2000, when the stock was valued at $83 and Enron was viewed as a savvy, new-economy company. Within months, the stock traded at 45 cents a share and employees lost their jobs in the failed company as well as their 401(k) assets.

Criticisms of the plans have made investors smarter and better able to invest wisely. The plans are still a great investment. But not until you recognize that you must get educated about them and do some of the work on researching investments yourselves. Unfortunately, plan sponsors are reluctant to provide this information for fear that giving employees information on the investments will make the employers liable if employees make bad choices.

But the 401(k) plans faced their biggest test in 2008 when all sections of the market were down 40 percent, according to Benna, who now serves as a consultant for 401(k) plans, helping employers to make the plans better for employees by cutting costs, improving investment options, and working with employees to help them understand how the plans work. And that's what we intend to do here. This book will give you the information you need to understand what happened to world markets in 2008, how your 401(k) figures in it and how to best use your plan going forward.

As for Benna, his brainchild certainly didn't make him a rich man. In fact, his career mirrors that of tens of thousands of men and women in the nearly thirty years since the 401(k) plan was developed. His employer was purchased by another benefits consultant, and then another. Benna worked on a contract basis until it ran out in 1993, when he was just fifty-two. But Benna had been a partner at Johnson Companies, and he was financially able to choose what he wanted to do. He didn't want to retire. Yet he needed a flexible job schedule that would accommodate his considerable volunteer work. A deeply religious man, he sits on the boards of a seminary, a bible college, and a church, and he speaks regularly to a group of Christian businessmen.

He also wanted to do something that would increase retirement savings for rank-and-file employees rather than for the high-paid executives who hired him as an employee benefits consultant. "Most of my work up until that point had been for small-business owners and professionals," Benna says. "There was a great tendency for these people to want to get personal benefit from their companies' retirement plans and to give very little to employees."

So Benna went out on his own, setting up the 401(k) Association, whose mission he defined as "anything that would fall under protecting and promoting 401(k) plans." Benna believes 401(k) plans are politically vulnerable because they cost so much in lost tax revenues and because they don't have a special lobbying group. The members of his group, who pay a small annual fee, are mostly individual plan participants who want to keep abreast of changes in this area. But Benna also sets up 401(k) plans for very small businesses at a nominal cost—his way, he says, of giving back and helping those who really need the retirement plans. Benna's choices reflect those that most of us must make, and inasmuch as we can anticipate them and be ready, we will undoubtedly be more satisfied.

In the years since 401(k) plans were introduced, they have come to dominate the world of personal finance and financial planning advice. They have changed the path of the stock market as well as the growth of mutual funds and the financial planning profession. Dozens of articles and books urge Americans to contribute, contribute, contribute to a 401(k) plan. Every day, studies are done and articles are written to show that Americans do not save enough for retirement. When you read these studies, you should remember that they are funded by vendors like Fidelity Investments or Bank of America who have a big stake in 401(k) plans. Your contributions can become their profits.

The surveys present a black-and-white picture that is discouraging to those who are struggling along in their lives trying to figure out how to pay the mortgage and wondering whether they will survive the next round of corporate downsizings. That's been truer than ever since the devastating crash of 2008.

This book does not assume that a 401(k) plan will solve all your problems in life. Nor does it assume that saving for retirement is the only thing you have to do with your money. Instead it will try to persuade you to aim for financial independence and show you how you can use your 401(k) plan as part of your "freedom strategy." Perhaps you will not have the luxury of leaving the money in your plan until you retire. Perhaps you will not want to. But get it in there. We should be doing everything we can to increase our options. Putting money away is one of them.

In more than thirty years of writing about business and money issues—six of them as the personal finance columnist for the Sunday edition of the New York Times—I've learned that for most Americans, dealing with money is more about psychology and less about dollars and cents. If you are told that you need $1 million worth of life insurance, $1 million in your retirement account, and $500,000 to educate your kids, you're likely to feel discouraged, throw up your hands and give up on the whole matter of financial planning. So rather than focusing on seemingly impossible goals, it's better to buy some life insurance, put some money in a retirement account, and think a bit about college savings.

With that in mind, know that 401(k) plans can be a terrific planning tool, that they should be your first priority for saving. In this book, I'll give you some investment tips on how to get the most out of the plans. I'll also show you what you need for a comfortable retirement. But I'm not going to beat the drum for two hundred pages on why you can never expect to be anything but a wage slave. I don't believe the outlook is that grim.

I'm also going to tell you something you've probably heard before: the baby-boom generation will be working longer than their parents did. The retirement age for Social Security is already changing for that generation.

There is some good news on the "working longer" front. Studies show that baby boomers are inventing new paths for themselves. Like George Kinder, the "life planner" I mentioned earlier, many Americans are taking the time to find their passions, to search out the things they love to do best, and then doing some research to see how these passions can be shaped into a part-time avocation with growth potential. One woman quit her job of twenty-five years to indulge her passion for sailing. But she found that sailing didn't keep her mind active full-time, so she agreed to go back to her company during some of the winter months. Companies say they are responding to the desire for flex-time and are offering more options, including leaves of absence, change in workplace for summer and winter and so on.

For George Kinder, the search started as a drive to spend more time in a place that to him spoke of poetry and peace and wonder. So he opened a branch of his financial planning service in Hawaii. But, as usually happens, one thing led to another and pretty soon he saw that the type of life planning he'd done for himself could be helpful to nearly everyone and so he turned his practice to life planning and then to training life planners.

We could all learn a lesson from Kinder about the importance of taking some time and energy to pursue passion in our lives. That doesn't mean we don't have to save for retirement. But it might mean we will have a happier life and an easier and more pleasant transition into retirement as a continuation of that life. The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) published a study in May 2009 that showed that older workers and retirees moving into different lines of work reported greater job satisfaction, chiefly because of less stress and more flexible work schedules.^[2]

I hope this book will set you thinking about how you might do that. I have put together a collection of short essays on the tasks you need to do to get the most from your 401(k) plan. They cover everything from getting into the plan to getting out of it and maximizing your money in retirement. Although they move in a somewhat logical order, the book is designed so that each "essay/thought" is presented on a single two-page spread. That means you can open the book anywhere and get one little piece of advice or information. You needn't read the book from front to back. You can dip in and read something you find interesting, or something you need to know right now. This will not be the end of the work you need to do. Lifetime planning is a big job and a critical one. Putting money away into a 401(k) plan is an important starting point.