One New Year's resolution worthy of consideration is an annual rebalancing of investments in our IRAs and other retirement plans. While almost every mutual fund invested in stocks is showing gains for the year, some have done better than others -- some far better, like health care and technology funds up more than 50 percent. Selling portions of some of our relative winners and adding more to the shares of our relative losers is counterintuitive, but we just have to hold our noses and take the plunge.

"Stuck on stupid" probably best describes me when I left the top down and the keys in my convertible at 7 a.m. on a recent Saturday morning to go for a 20-minute daily run. Running back up the street, I thought I might be suffering from a touch of dementia when I couldn't figure out why the car wasn't where I thought I had left it. This was only a mile from my house on a quiet residential street. It turned out that I had been robbed.

My holiday "Advice for Kids" column typically offers grist for the mill designed to stimulate a family discussion around saving and managing money. This year, some regular readers over the years may find the usual advice like "stay out of Starbucks and invest the $2 per day" a little tedious. For them, I'll offer the fundamentals that explain how Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg can suddenly be worth close to $15 billion -- and how it could just as well happen to you.

At the five-year anniversary of the Bernie Madoff tragedy, major news publications have published interviews with victims regarding how their lives have been altered, in some cases, by losing everything. It brings us to the question of how much money is enough.

People were attracted to Madoff because of a lack of understanding about what they were trying to accomplish. They talked themselves into taking risks to achieve what they thought was important.

With my 97-year-old father in a nursing home, I find myself getting a lot of valuable, firsthand experience with the nation's health care delivery system -- especially the costs.

Someone recently suggested that railroad stocks in this country were about to take a hit because the new Panama Canal would take larger ships and that the "land bridge" served by railroads bringing Chinese-made goods from the West Coast to the rest of the country would be hit hard.

After hearing Leon Panetta speak recently at the Oakland Speakers Series, I think his likeness should be added to Mount Rushmore. It's hard to imagine a former congressman who has been called to such a distinguished trajectory through Washington's corridors of power.

"The fish are back" is a term professional traders deploy when amateur investors return to the options and commodities markets. I was reminded of this when last Monday's Wall Street Journal had a front-page article trumpeting, "Stocks Regain Broad Appeal -- Mom-and-Pop Investors are back."

If ignorance is bliss, then target retirement date funds have arrived just in time for those who are seeking that state of mind. Start humming that mantra as you invest your 401(k) account with the target date that matches the time you have left until retirement. Then, sit and watch as your contemporaries at work slowly accumulate substantially more money in their account over time -- maybe 50 percent more -- by actively managing their money and safely adopting more risk. What I just wrote is not a contradiction in terms as I'll explain in a moment.

The upcoming initial public offering for Twitter prompts me to wonder if this is something that would be a good investment bet. I don't "tweet" myself because I'm too verbose for a message limited to just 140 characters, but at last count there were millions of other people who were using the site so they don't need me at this point.