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Many households are considering their financial future this time of year and making planning decisions that will ultimately impact retirement. Follow recent coverage on important resources and mistakes to avoid when planning for retirement.

Automatic enrollment for retirement saving is both effective and popular among all income, gender and ethnic groups. It has increased participation, helped people to both start saving earlier and to make appropriate investment choices.This mechanism would be even more useful, especially for younger workers and those with low-to-moderate incomes if retirement savings plans also allowed employees to save for unexpected expenses. Recent research by the US Financial Diaries Project, which looks at the actual income flows of low-to-moderate income consumers shows why this feature would be valuable.

President Barack Obama calls them loopholes, although investors consider them playing by the rules.

Now that we're past the midyear of 2014, it's a great time to review your retirement savings plan to make sure you're on track. If you're not contributing enough or haven't rebalanced your portfolio since George W. Bush was in office, you have the remainder of the year to make some adjustments.

ConocoPhillips Co. has the best 401(k) plan for workers, while Facebook Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Whole Foods Market Inc. offer some of the worst, according to a Bloomberg News  survey of the 250 largest public companies in the country.

If you're rushing to get your taxes done before today's midnight deadline, take some comfort that you're not alone.

You've undoubtedly heard the advice again and again: If you are close to retirement age, you should max out your contributions to employer-sponsored retirement plans.

The federal agency that insures private pensions is proposing a rule change that would add greater protection for workers who roll 401(k) money into a traditional pension.

Remember when AOL announced recently that it would pay its 401(k) matching contributions to employees in a lump sum at the end of the year, rather than during each pay period, potentially costing employees' retirement nest eggs thousands of dollars? If workers left in November, they'd lose out on nearly a year's worth of company contributions. Those who stayed forfeited any gains made throughout the year.

It's bad enough that employers are doing away with traditional pensions and adopting 401(k)s that foist all the investing decisions onto workers, leaving them vulnerable to the vagaries of the market.