Kiplinger's idea of a good Christmas present for a teenager is helping them start a retirement account. We kind of think the average teen is going to have a hard time understanding why that's a "better" gift than, say, a game system, but the underlying idea is sound. As long as your teen worked at some point in 2007—even babysitting counts— It's not as sexy a topic as dog treats, but it's an important one: tax planning mistakes. More specifically, how to avoid some of the most common ones. Kiplinger lists There's a huge gap between many Americans' perceptions of what life in retirement will be and the practicalities of what their finances will allow. The former is often a time of limited work, relaxation, and enjoying the twilight years of life while the latter forces decisions about working longer, relying more on relatives, and doing without past pleasures and purchases. This gap exists for good reason -- it's expensive to retire in the United States. The amount of savings needed to support today's retiree, who can be expected to live a couple decades or so longer, is mind-blowing and, for many, unattainable.

So what's a retiree to do? It boils down to the old two-choice formula for improving your financial picture, increase income or decrease expenses.

It's usually difficult to increase income, but there is a viable alternative that can substantially decrease living costs in retirement: move to a foreign country. Consider the following:

"Suppose you can find a place where the cost of living is about 75% of the cost in the United States -- some beach town north of Puerto Vallarta or south of Manzanillo. What happens to your standard of living when you move to Mexico? It rises to the equivalent of about $42,400 in the U.S."

Yes, there are health care issues, family issues, cultural issues, and so on. But when you're in a desperate financial situation, as many retirees will be, sometimes a highly unusual move is called for. As such, "Adios, America" becomes a viable retirement option.

This list of Okay, so Jack Hough's column in SmartMoney this week is really just an extended ad for his new book. But in this case, the content of the book is something valuable that we think a lot of Consumerist readers will want to know about: how to identify reliable stock picking strategies.

For instance, he dissects the way mutual funds are created, culled to isolate the best-performing ones, and then marketed as if they're built on sound strategies and not luck:The mutual-fund industry was all but founded on [survivorship bias]. Firms create ("incubate") far more funds than they need and fill each with different investments. Some win, some lose. Guess which ones go on to get marketed and which get quietly closed? Decades of research have shown that the average managed stock fund falls miserably short of the broad market's returns. Yet survivorship bias ensures a constant supply of magazine ads with splashy performance figures. Dead funds tell no tales.Hough says a good stock picking strategy should meet five qualifications:

• they're based on a strong correlation
• they're based on logic
• the strategies are carefully screened to eliminate survivorship bias and to ensure the clue in question is the best explanation for what's happening, and not some other, hidden variable
• the strategies are practical
• the strategies can be reduced to the language of stock screeners

Of course, he saves the actual strategies for the book, but says he'll excerpt two of them in future columns over the next couple of weeks.

"Author Debunks Financial Parlor Tricks" [SmartMoney]
(Photo: Getty)