Roger,
The best thing you can do for your financial
future is invest the time to educate yourself.
Otherwise, you will be at the mercy of financial
planners. Believe me, very few of them are
smarter than you and none are your "friend".
Please get a copy of Bernstein's "4 Pillars of
Investing" and all the mystery will be cleared
up.
I gathered from your other post that you are
already involved with a planner. IMHO, you
would be far better off putting your IRA into
something safe, like Vanguard's Short Term
Corporate Bond Fund, and spend the time
necessary to learn about investing.
If you really don't want to deal with handling
your own money, I recommend you check out
Vanguard's Life Strategy Funds or the Target
Retirement Funds. These are balanced index
funds that do the re-balancing for you automatically.
The cost of these funds is about 0.25%, which is
far cheaper than paying a planner to invest for
you and getting poorer results.
Please excuse the rant, but I have the same
discussion with my children frequently. Since
you are already retired you should know better
already.
Cheers,
Charlie (aka Chuck-Lyn)