Happy Friday and happy 401(k) day.

Sponsored by the Profit Sharing/401(k) Council of America, 401(k) day is “is an annual celebration spotlighting the importance of employer-sponsored profit sharing and 401(k) plans.”

A lot of the features on the web site are for members or the PSCA, so if your employer isn’t celebrating, you can’t play the “Amazing Road to Retirement” game, for example. But some of the calculators are open to all.

What can you do to celebrate 401(k) Day?

1. Open one up, if you haven’t already.
2. Check to make sure that you are contributing enough to receive the full company match, so you aren’t passing up free money. If you’re not, make that change today.
3. If you are contributing, consider increasing your contribution by a mere 1 percent. Most 401(k) plan web sites will have a calculator showing you how contributing a little more to your retirement plan has less of an impact to your take-home pay than you’d think.
4. Check your portfolio’s mix. Are you still in the stable value fund that your company stuck you in when you started? Do you have too much company stock? Are you overloaded in commodities waiting to fall? If you have no idea what I’m talking about, use the asset allocation tools that your 401(k) provides to figure out your model portfolio.
5. Readers, suggest a fifth “to-do” for the list.

There have been plenty of columns written around the country lately about the rise in 401(k) loans and whether it makes sense to take one.

In conversations over the past couple of months with plan administrators such as Fidelity and Schwab, I’ve asked if they’re seeing an uptick. The answer was always no.

Now, Investment News has a story featuring new data from Hewitt Associates and a survey of other administrators that say loans have actually decreased a few percentage points, not increased. Although hardship withdrawals are up with the money going to help people stave off foreclosure.

The story reminded me of when I followed three families trying to get out of debt for a year. One family had a 401(k) with maybe $40,000 and a few grand in an IRA. And they did not want to touch them. They worked harder, cut expenses, hit the food shelf from time-to-time. But they did not want to tap that 401(k).

I don’t think they’re alone.  Especially in economically challenging times, people do not want to use retirement money to live today. Also, people worry in uncertain times that if they lost their job, they wouldn’t be able to pay the loan back.

How about you? Do you think it makes sense to keep money in a 401(k) even if you desperately need it today? Or do we treat 401(k)s as sacred when really paying a 10 percent penalty is a small price to pay to put food on the table?

Anyone having fun looking at your investment portfolio these days? Probably not so much given the S&P 500 and the MSCI World Index are both down about 9 percent this year. Let’s just say I didn’t rip mine open immediately when it came home last night.

I was appreciative of another letter sent to me from my 401(k) company last week. It was the transaction record for the automatic rebalance program I have in place. This lets me set and forget my asset allocation and not let emotion or inertia get in the way of a well-balanced mutual funds diet.

If it weren’t for my rebalancing being on auto pilot, would I have taken close to $500 from my high-flying commodities fund and put it into my ailing international fund? Probably not.

How do you manage to stay on target in a tough market?

I try to max out a Roth IRA each year. I like this type of account, which I’ve referred to as the little black dress of personal finance, because of its versatility. It’s designed for retirement, but since it’s an after-tax account, you can take your contributions out tax free at any time. That makes it a great save for emergencies, save for a big ticket item account.

Although, of course, if you have all of your money in aggressive stock funds, you could risk losing some of your principal and not having it available if you need it. So I have another smaller emergency savings account too.

Anyway, this weekend I received a statement for my 2007 contributions to my IRA. In 2007, you could contribute $4,000; this year it’s $5,000. You can contribute to an IRA for the prior year through tax day– aka April 15th. So my monthly contributions in January through March actually went towards my 2007 limit. Confused, yet?

So the statement said that I saved $4,000.95 for tax year 2007. But the max is $4,000. How annoying is that? I blame it on my mid-year attempt to save exactly $4,000 through dollar cost averaging. Clearly, I goofed on my math, which is no surprise since I often make tweaks to my finances at night when everyone else is asleep and I have the time, but not always the brain power.

I called A.B.C. mutual fund company and told them of my situation. The woman said she couldn’t tell me to do nothing on the recorded line, but that she’s never heard of the IRS flagging a return because a person saved .95 cents too much in a tax advantaged account.

If I wanted to, she would send out an excess contributions form, which would guide me through the calculations to determine how much I earned on that .95 cents and what penalty or taxes I would owe. That sounds time consuming on several levels.

With the contribution limits for IRAs indexed to inflation going forward, I hope that A.B.C and other fund companies that undoubtedly have thousands of customers who wish to max out their IRAs by automatically socking away a sum each month will streamline this process. Anyone know a company that does make this easy?

For those of you who want the whole excess contributions enchilada, here’s IRS Pub 590 .

The surveys on retirement pile up like an early-spring blizzard and are about as annoying. But they do what they’re designed to do: Get people to start thinking about retirement planning. The hope too, is that you’ll use their financial products and advisers to plan, of course.

The first is from Mass Mutual. The most interesting finding in their survey of 17,000 individuals:

More money saved does not equal more confidence. Only 44 percent
of high savers expressed confidence when making their investment
decisions, compared to 54 percent of low and medium savers.

What’s your number?

A lame ING survey (sorry ING, love the “high interest” savings account, but…) found that:

Americans view numbers relating to their sense of identity and their closest personal relationships as most important to them. The numbers frequently mentioned as significant are their own birthday (cited by 26% of respondents) or someone else’s birthday (22%). Other important numbers include a Social Security number (16%), a wedding anniversary (16%), a phone number (13%) and the number of children or siblings in one’s family (12%).

Only a small fraction (5%) consider a financial number, such as their retirement nest egg, as being among those most important to them. ING to the rescue.

The retirement game

The winner of the shameless attention grabbing non sequiter is Lincoln Financial, who did a survey that found 72 percent of Americans will spend less than one hour making their March Madness tourney picks this year compared to the 87 percent of respondents who plan to spend up to five hours in March thinking about retirement planning. I don’t buy it.

Who comes up with this stuff? And is it only so that their executives can make bad sports-money analogies (you know, crossing the finish line=retirement, get some skin in the game=start saving for retirement….)