Expire-ment Planning

Retirement planning is certainly a legitimate concern, but have we done any planning for life after retirement

"Is this the year you finally start to save more money?" asks Jane Bryant Quinn in a Newsweek article on personal finance (January 19, 1998). "The tax breaks for doing so look better than ever. Starting this [year], traditional Individual Retirement Accounts have been expanded to cover more middle-income people." And the new Roth IRAs are being plugged "as something every well-dressed investment portfolio should own."

Saving money. Tax breaks. IRAs. Well-dressed investment portfolios. All of these phrases point toward a popular subject: retirement planning. Many of us are concerned about our retirement, and about whether we have saved enough money to live comfortably through our final decades. We wonder: Are our IRAs large enough? Are our investment portfolios diversified enough? And ultimately: Will we run out of money before we run out of life?

Retirement planning is a certainly a legitimate concern, but today's lesson from Luke points us toward a different issue: one we might...