In Brief

By Anamaria Wilson

TOTAL IT UP The Social Security Administration has just made planning your retirement easier. At ssa.gov/retire a "quick" calculator lets you input your current earnings and age (provided you are 22 to 62), and gives a rough estimate of your retirement benefits.It assumes you started working at 22 and have worked continuously since then. Finer-tuned calculations can be had by inputting more info or downloading software.

CLEAR FOCUS Tired of waiting for those quarterly reports that show how the individual stocks in your mutual funds have been doing? Montgomery Asset Management is rolling out a family of "focused funds" called Stock Solutions that will put its investments into more "transparent" portfolios. Fund owners will have online access to information on stock holdings and their allocations, albeit with a two-week lag (instead of the three months or six months it takes most fund companies). That way, you can dump a fund sooner if you don't like its dogs.

TAKE A CLOSE LOOK Since most people planning funerals aren't focused on the, er, bottom line, they don't think of comparison shopping. But that leaves them vulnerable to possible sharp practices, like the charging of hidden burial costs. This is according to testimony given last week before a Senate subcommittee looking into problems consumers have had with the funeral industry. The conclusion: with funeral costs already outpacing inflation, it can pay grieving relatives to shop around.

--By Anamaria Wilson