Washington blessed them as a way to put your 401(k) on automatic pilot and glide safely toward retirement. But popular target-date mutual funds have badly missed the mark - and now regulators are asking why.

A group of well-to-do German senior citizens, who lost their savings in the credit crunch, staged a revenge attack and held their terrified financial advisor to ransom, according to several published reports Wednesday.

People in the business community often argue against expanding public health care and pension benefits, arguing that this would raise taxes and that the private sector can do a better job providing those benefits than the government. But the evidence is mounting that the private sector can't.

It times like these, we'd all welcome a nice chunk of change, but how you spend it opens the door to a number of financial challenges.