Retirement income sources, including annuities, reverse mortgages, Social Security and LTCI, were topics of this two-hour seminar from the Retirement Income Certified Professional program at The American College. (Above: Curtis Cloke, Richard Weber and David Littell.)

Three pioneers in the creative use of annuities in retirement portfolios--Wade Pfau, Joe Tomlinson, and Steve Vernon--have created an "efficient frontier" for deferred income annuities in two reports published in November by the Society of Actuaries.

'The Big Short,' in which the actress Margot Roddie (above) provides exposition from her bath, is an excellent docudrama based on Michael Lewis' bestseller. It blames the financial crisis on private-sector fraud and stupidity, not on ACORN, the GSEs or Barney Frank.

'My proposal was to link the growth of Social Security benefits of the upper third of earners to CPI growth while letting the benefits of the lower third of earners continue to rise with the wage index,' said the former president of Fidelity Investments in this wide-ranging interview.