Concerned about making too much money and bumping into the limit on how much you can sock away in an employee retirement plan this year? Looking to max out your SEP IRA contributions? You've come to the right place. Listed below are the the limits to all federally sponsored employer retirement plans.

Contribution Limits
Elective deferrals for 401(k), 403(b), 457 and SAR-SEPs   $15,500
401(k), 403(b), 457 and SAR-SEP Catch-Up Contribution     $5,000
Defined Contribution Plan Limit                           $46,000
Maximum SEP IRA Contribution                              $46,000
SIMPLE IRA and SIMPLE 401(k) Contribution                 $10,500
SIMPLE IRA and SIMPLE 401(k) Catch-Up Contribution        $2,500

SEP Minimum Earnings Limit                                $500
Maximum Annual Defined Benefit Limit                      $185,000
PBGC Maximum Monthly Benefit                              $4,312.50

Maximum Includable Compensation                           $230,000
Highly Compensated Employee                               $105,000
Key Employee                                              > $150,000

Personal exemption               $3,500

Phaseout of personal exemption
       Single                    $159,950
       Married filing jointly    $239,950
       Head of Household         $199,950
       Married filing separately $119,975

Standard Deduction
       Single                    $5,450
       Married filing jointly    $10,900
       Head of Household         $8,000
       Married filing separately $5,450

Elderly or blind additional deduction
       Single                    $1,350
       Married                   $1,050

Phaseout of itemized deductions
       Single                    $79,975
       Married filing jointly    $159,950

Kiddie tax standard deduction    $900

Traditional IRA Contribution Limit:      $5,000
Roth IRA Contribution Limit:             $5,000

Traditional IRA Catch-Up Contribution:   $1,000
Roth IRA Catch-Up Contribution:          $1,000

IRA Deduction Phaseout for Active Participants
           Single                        $53,000 – $63,000
           Married filing jointly        $85,000 – $105,000
           Married filing separately     $0 – $10,000

IRA Deduction Phaseouts for Spousal Contributions
           Married filing jointly        $159,000 – $169,000

Roth IRA Contribution Phaseout
           Single                        $101,000 – $116,000
           Married filing jointly        $159,000 – $169,000
           Married filing separately     $0 – $10,000

Roth IRA Conversion Phaseout
           Single                        $100,000
           Married filing jointly        $100,000
               Note: both of these limits will be eliminated in 2010
           Married filing separately     ineligible

Do you remember the retirement investment seminar I told you I would attend last week? I went to it thinking I might learn something new. (See You are Never Too Old) As it turns out I did learn something new. I didn't learn anything new about investing, but I did learn something new about selling financial planning services.

I realized how important it is to see investing as the boring activity it is. In fact, investing really isn't much of an activity at all. Investing is mostly inactivity.

The financial planner conducting the seminar did a great job keeping the audience engaged as he went along with his presentation. There were plenty of questions from the attendees, and many of them showed the audience was listening and learning.

One question in particular had to do with keeping a long term perspective when it came to saving for retirement. Maybe it wasn't so much a question as a protest. She didn't like the idea of sitting and waiting for her nest egg to grow. She felt like she should be doing something, taking some kind of action, doing some work to make her investments grow.

From time to time I like to put on my geek hat and do some charts and graphs. This weekend was one of those Monte Carlo weekends.

You've probably seen those pretty Monte Carlo charts the financial planning sites are so fond of. You know the ones. You input the value of your retirement savings today and your risk tolerance. You tell it how old you are, how long you think you'll live and when you'd like to retire. Then you give it an estimate of your retirement expenses. When you click the submit button they show you a graph of how your portfolio will perform in the future.

Well, not exactly how it will perform. The charts I've seen usually have a bunch of lines, each roughly progressing up and to the right, but with fluctuating returns. You probably know the ones I'm talking about. If you don't, you're about to see some examples which will get you familiar with them.

Now I remember why I dropped my subscription to Money Magazine. So many times I'd open up my issue hoping to find a pearl of financial wisdom and I'd be disappointed at some of the inane articles and advice I'd read there.

Today they published an interview with economist Laurence Kotlikoff, who believes the financial planning software used by financial planners advises people to save too much for retirement.

What I am saying is that online calculators advise most people to save too much. The same is true with the software that planners use. They start with the assumption that you need 70 percent to 85 percent of your current income to maintain your lifestyle in retirement.

Isn't that a little like saying doctors advise smoking less because your chances of developing lung cancer may be low enough if you only smoke a little?

It's a dog-eat-dog investment world out there today. Figuring out what's the best investment vehicle in any given situation can be a challenge. One of the areas where people seem to have a really tough time of it is in IRA investing.

IRA accounts are different. They have a special tax status; and that tends to throw people off when it comes to how to invest those funds.

First a quick review... The traditional IRA is a tax deferral vehicle. Money deposited into a traditional IRA is deductible, and is allowed to appreciate tax deferred. Taxes on capital gains, interest and dividends in a traditional IRA are due as withdrawals occur. And of course the expectation is your tax rate will be lower in retirement when you start taking those withdrawals. With a Roth IRA taxes are already paid on the funds you deposit, contributions are not tax deductible. But from that point forward the account is exempt from taxes.

It is because of these tax advantages that funds inside an IRA account are particularly well suited for certain types of investments.

As you get to that magical point in your life when you're about ready to let your money work for you instead of the other way around, you might find the task of managing that nest egg a bit daunting. Even if you've never considered it before, you might realize you need the help of an investment advisor now.

You've come a long way. You've earned enough to secure your future. You don't want to risk making a wrong step now. You certainly want to take advantage of any strategies which will preserve your wealth while minimizing taxes. This is what investment advisors do. They're trained to help you navigate the complexity of managing your portfolio.

Investment advisors help you to get the most out of your money during the time of your life when your money is working for you.

If you decide to work with an investment advisor, whether a Certified Financial Planner, or any number of other professional designations, you will want to do a little research. Just as you would read an annual report or an investment prospectus for a prospective investment, you should seek out whatever information is on file for anyone with whom you are considering as an investment advisor.

Risk questions are everywhere: How much stock is the right amount of stock in my portfolio given my age? Am I too conservative if I have x% in bonds today? I'm risk averse, will I be able to retire if I shy away from stocks? As I age, should I take some risk off the table, be more conservative?

Boy do I wish there were easy answers to the questions of how much risk to take on.

When it comes to risk, it boils down simply to what you want to accomplish in your life and how much you're willing to roll the dice to do it.

Suppose you're risk averse. You will have to accumulate an enormous nest egg if your goal is to retire and live off that nest egg without the benefits of capital appreciation (and it's associated risk). That's the reality of inflation protected interest income. It's very expensive. Just replacing your current income would require upwards of fifty times that income in these securities. And for that you don't ever get the chance to buy that retirement vacation home or start that foundation. You just get to keep living at your same standard of living for as long as you live.

OK so maybe that's a bit misleading. I didn't actually spend the weekend in Monte Carlo. I did, however, spend the weekend learning about and doing a few Monte Carlo simulations.

For the uninitiated, Monte Carlo simulations are a statistical process for forecasting event outcomes. The process involves repeatedly running a scenario whose outcome is determined by the interplay of various parameters. The parameters themselves are subject to some statistical variance. The Monte Carlo process repeats the scenario process any number of times using these random variations and tabulates the results, yielding a distribution of likely outcomes.

What I set out to do this weekend was educate myself in the ways of using a spreadsheet to perform Monte Carlo simulations on various mixes of securities. I wanted to know - I still want to know - just what sort of diversification scheme is most suited for me and my investment style.

It's not hard to understand that taking on more risk can result in a much larger nest egg down the road; but that taking on that risk also greatly increases the chances of going bust. Alternatively, shunning risk greatly reduces the chances of going bust, but your portfolio's future value can be severely limited. Monte Carlo simulations against various mixes of low and high risk securities in a portfolio can help us to understand what future portfolio values we might expect at a given level of risk.

My models are producing interesting results. Not altogether unexpected, but they do illustrate the importance of being well diversified and accepting some amount of risk.