Is Your Plan for Retirement Too Safe?

In this episode of Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing , Motley Fool retirement expert Robert Brokamp looks at some investing rules of thumb that may be overly cautious, causing you to work longer than necessary. He also discusses:

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center . When you're ready to invest, check out this top 10 list of stocks to buy .

Will AI create the world's first trillionaire? Our team just released a report on the one little-known company, called an "Indispensable Monopoly" providing the critical technology Nvidia and Intel both need. Continue »

The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Comcast wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.

Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $443,191 !* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $1,258,838 !*

Now, it’s worth noting Stock Advisor’s total average return is 941 % — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 211% for the S&P 500. Don't miss the latest top 10 list, available with Stock Advisor , and join an investing community built by individual investors for individual investors.

Robert Brokamp: Is your retirement plan too safe? And how financial mistakes could be a sign of cognitive decline. That and more on this Saturday Personal Finance Edition of The Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing Podcast. I'm Robert Brokamp, and for today's main segment, I'm going to discuss a few assumptions about retirement planning that might be too cautious.

But first some recent headlines that caught my eye, I'll start with a segment from NPR's Planet Money with the title, How your bank account might predict dementia. It started with the story of Sandra Baliban, who hadn't been in close contact with her father for a while. When she visited him, his house was a mess, and amidst the clutter were credit card statements showing purchases of scammy-seeming health products and online subscriptions. Her father couldn't explain them. He had also lost the $1-$2 million he had in his retirement accounts. When Sandra reviewed his brokerage statements, they didn't make sense. She described them as an extremely erratic pattern of investments. He also hadn't paid his taxes in years. The segment then brought in Lauren Nicholas, who is a professor of geriatrics at the University of Colorado, and she contributed to a study, which found that wealth begins to decline about six years before a dementia diagnosis due to impaired financial decision-making. As Nicholas said in the interview, "Dementia is one of the diseases where you lose a lot of cognitive capabilities over time, that are unfortunately closely tied to our ability to manage our own money. We actually see some of the earliest signs show up in financial portfolios and checkbooks."