I left my corporate job about six years ago to be at home with my daughter. I still have a 401-K with my former employer. I've busy with other things in my life and don't pay too much attention to it. Occasionally I'll look at it a little more closely and reallocate a bit.

My 401-K includes some of my former employer's stock. After talking with other former employees who know current employees I reallocated a portion of that stock to other funds, maybe a year or two ago. From what I heard it didn't sound like things were going all that great.

About a week ago I got the 401-K statement. As I perused the statement I noticed that stocks were down, bonds were up, and my former employer's stock was considerably lower than what it was compared to. Hmm, I thought, either they will go bankrupt in which case my stock probably won't be worth much, or they will get bought out, in which case the stock price is likely to go up. Maybe I should reallocate more of this stock. After I put the statement down I kind of forgot about it.

Fast forward to yesterday. As I read the business section of the local newspaper, I noticed that my former company is being bought by another company, and the stock price of my former company jumped quite a bit.

Just another example of Mr Market being smarter than me, as I read in Broken Arrow's blog the other day. I couldn't predict the future on this, although I think I did come up with the two most likely scenarios. And I kind of surprised myself that I actually know as much as I do.

During our conversation yesterday, DH and I discussed the mutual fund. He's kind of nervous about it, because we keep buying shares but its value doesn't seem to go up. (It's value has gone up in other years.) I haven't been following it that closely, but it is a Vanguard retirement fund. Isn't the market kind of in a slump? I know I opened up my 401-K statement recently - the stock funds were down and the bond funds were up.

Anyone have any suggestions for what to say to calm DH down about this topic? The next "good" time I'm going to discuss increasing the amount we are putting into the mutual fund.

Well, it's been an interesting day here in the onion patch. Yesterday's discussion/confrontation touched off some, um, bad feelings. We finally got that straightened out enough. The mood was decent and DH and I had some free time so I brought up retirement.

DH's current strategy for retirement is: work until he can't work any more or dies. I think this strategy is a bit short-sighted. His job has no 401-K/pension/savings plan, and he has none of the above from previous jobs. I have a 401-K from my 10-year stint in corporate America.

A few years ago, in an attempt to get DH more involved in our finances, I asked him to figure out how much he thought we would need for retirement. He never got back to me.

Now, one of his coworkers' mothers is in assisted living and has outlived her money. I think she had very little, except the profit from selling her house. The assisted living center told the family that mom needed to move out when her money ran out because they no longer took medicaid (or whatever it is). This was contrary to what they were told when mom moved in. Lawyers are now involved, and DH is having an eye-opening front row seat. I think it's increased his awareness that maybe this could be a problem for us.

During our conversation I tried to get him to do as much of the thinking as he could. When do you think we'll retire? He figures at age 70. How long do you think we'll live after that? Hemming and hawing - he finally picked 85. How much money do you think we'll need? About 4000 per month, he says. Multiplying it all out he came to 720,000. Between my 401-K and our (very small) mutual fund we've got about 100,000 for retirement already. That leaves 620,000 total to this goal . . . 24,800 per year, or 2,066 per month. DH did not take any interest into account. . . but even if the numbers aren't accurate I'm happy to even have gotten him this involved in discussing retirement.