No sense burying the lead. The bottom line is this: Regardless of your age, the time to begin saving for retirement is always right now.
With that in mind, don't let a sense of being "too young" (as if!) or "too old" (heaven forbid!) stop you from getting going. Seriously, it's precisely those kinds of perceptions that can stand between you and a plump nest egg come retirement time.
Go forward, move ahead
For savvy types (such as you, Fool), the question therefore isn't "whether to" but rather "how to" -- and a good question it is, as well.
In order to answer it, serious retirement savers will need to determine their timeline -- how long before they'll begin drawing down their savings for living expenses -- and what their tolerance for risk is -- how much volatility they're willing to tolerate along the way to retirement bliss.
Needless to say, there should be a direct correlation between the answers to those two questions. Once you've connected the dots (so to speak), you'll be in a good position to determine where you should plunk down your hard-earned retirement savings.
Jump-start your research
In an upcoming commentary, I'll focus on equities that could be appropriate for retirement savers of the buttoned-down variety. For those of the growth persuasion, however, I think that tech stocks look mighty interesting right now. As a group, they've fared quite poorly over the past five years, but as with any contrarian investment approach, of course, the tough part is separating the values from the value traps.
On that front, one way to jump-start your research is to zero in on just those companies with healthy levels of free cash flow and with price multiples that clock in below those of industry peers.
With those metrics in mind, Dell (NASDAQ:DELL), Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL), Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO), and Motorola (NYSE:MOT) look mighty attractive right now, boasting price-to-earnings and price-to-cash flow multiples below those of their typical sector rivals. TexasInstruments (NYSE:TXN), Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (NYSE:TSM), and Applied Materials (NASDAQ:AMAT) look intriguing on those fronts, too.
Home sweet home
To each his or her own when it comes to stock investing, of course, and if you're not currently interested in tech (perhaps because you're full up on the suckers), rest assured that the market is, as always, offering compelling deals in all its sectors.
The Fool has boatloads of information and commentary you can use to home in on the kinds of stocks that suit you best, and, in addition, we provide another service -- Rule Your Retirement -- that will help you put it all together and use that information for securing a comfy life in your dotage.
Indeed, Rule Your Retirement exists to help you "Perfect Your Portfolio" and live "The Good Life" (to borrow the titles of two of the newsletter's recurring features), and I encourage serious savers both young and old to take the service for a spin. In fact, if you'd like a taste test, a 30-day guest pass is yours for the taking. Your pass provides access to all of the newsletter's back issues, planning tools, and members-only discussion boards. So ahead and give it a whirl -- and prepare to hit the back nine (so to speak) in style.
Shannon Zimmerman runs point on the Fool's Champion Funds newsletter service and doesn't own any of the companies mentioned. Dell is an Inside Value and Stock Advisor recommendation. The Fool has a strict disclosure policy, which you can peruse by clicking righthere.
