Retirement Investments: A Beginner’s Guide

Choosing the right investments and retirement account are critical to getting the most for your retirement savings.

Tiffany Lam-Balfour
Lead Writer | Merrill Lynch, UBS AG, UBS Global Asset Management, Credit Suisse

Tiffany Lam-Balfour is a former investing writer and spokesperson at NerdWallet. Previously, she was a senior financial advisor and sales manager at Merrill Lynch. Her work has been featured in MSN, MarketWatch, Entrepreneur, Nasdaq and Yahoo Finance. Tiffany earned a finance and management degree from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Robert Beaupre leads the SMB team at NerdWallet. He has covered financial topics as an editor for more than a decade. Before joining NerdWallet, he served as senior editorial manager of QuinStreet's insurance sites and managing editor of Insure.com. In addition, he served as an online media manager for the University of Nevada, Reno.

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Advancements in medicine and technology are helping us live longer than ever before. But the prospect of living in retirement for up to 40 years — often the same time frame an individual spends working — makes saving and planning all the more important.

Yet saving is only one piece of the retirement puzzle. Choosing the right underlying investments and retirement account are critical to getting the most from your savings. Here’s how to manage that process.