The 401(k) is enjoying a wee bit of a corporate comeback.

Fidelity Investments, which says it's the leading provider of workplace retirement savings plans in the US, disclosed Thursday morning that some of the companies which reduced their financial contributions to 401(k) plans during the financial meltdown have started ponying up money again, or at least plan to. More

Have some pity on Ruth Madoff. Really. I'm serious.

Her fate and her wealth are on my mind because of the auction, scheduled for today, at which the U.S. Marshals Service is slated to sell off hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of property seized from her and her husband, the infamous Bernie. The marshals intend to use that money to help reimburse the victims of Bernie's multi-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme.

Admittedly, looking over a list of Ruth's possessions on  the auction block, it is a little tough to feel sorry for her. More

The Money's Two Cents blog from MONEY magazine was relaunched in October 2009 as More Money. Please visit CNNMoney.com/moremoney for the latest posts.

It's rotten enough, of course, that September's unemployment rate, as reported Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, rose to 9.8%; it's looking as if the unemployment rate will reach the 10% mark before the Dow hits its own nice round number of 10,000.

But the numbers are even worse for particular segments of the population. As USA Today reports, the jobless rate for single people is more than double that of married people — 13.5% for the unmarried in August vs. 6.3% for wedded workers. More

It's Friday — time to catch up on some of the week's most interesting, and sometimes puzzling, news in the world of personal finance.

1. Thought you had health insurance? Hah! The Washington Post ran a great story Monday about how insurance companies have canceled the health insurance policies of thousands of people after those policyholders have filed for claims related to expensive medical problems. The cancellations, known in the trade as "rescissions," are ostensibly justified by policyholders' failure to disclose previously existing medical conditions — think of someone who survives a heart attack who doesn't admit to cardiac problems when applying for health coverage the following year. The problem, according to the Post, is that rescission has become not only a tool for fighting fraud, but an excuse for insurance companies to weasel out of paying claims. One such case: After a woman filed a claim for emergency gallbladder surgery, her attorney alleges, her health insurer canceled coverage for her and her husband because he had failed to mention his high cholesterol. More

Here's my suggestion for solving the nation's healthcare crisis — the one that I would propose at one of those town-meeting shoutfests if I could get in a word edgewise: Make sure that members of Congress are living with the same health benefits that the rest of us are.

As reported recently by the Los Angeles Times, you see, senators and members of the House of Representatives enjoy a health insurance program that insulates them from the costs, problems and worries suffered by millions of uninsured and underinsured Americans. Like other government workers, they have their choice of ten different health plans, while 85% of companies offering a health plan to their employees offer a single option. They pay a modest $300 a month for family coverage, according to the Times. And — in stark contrast to the difficulties faced by cancer survivors or diabetes sufferers who try to get health insurance on the individual market — they don't have to worry that pre-existing medical conditions will prevent them from getting coverage or sorely limit their coverage if they do manage to get a policy.

With such cushy benefits, it's easy for members of Congress to get all passionate about the theoretical issues surrounding health care funding and the social safety net, while ignoring the practical realities what it's like to go broke paying for catastrophic or chronic medical expenses. So let's help them focus their minds and best intentions on the problem at hand.

What we'll do is randomly select senators and representatives to live with a particular quality of health care in the same proportion as the rest of Americans. Forty-six million Americans — 18% of the non-elderly population (in other words, too young to qualify for Medicare) — don't have health insurance at any one time, according to the U.S. Census. So 18% of members of Congress — 18 senators and 78 representatives — will start walking around uninsured. Very quickly, one supposes, they'll be a lot more nervous crossing the street and a lot more worried when a family member starts running a temperature during flu season.

But that wouldn't give Congress a complete taste of the anxiety that Americans feel about their health care — the knowledge that even if you do have affordable health insurance, you could lose it at any moment. All it takes is a job loss or an employer who decides it's just too expensive to provide insurance as a benefit. So, because by one estimate one-third of the non-elderly went without health insurance over 2007 and 2008, we'll make sure that 33 senators and 145 representatives randomly lose their health coverage for a time over each two-year session of Congress. That averages out to roughly a year without health insurance for all those lucky congressmen and congresswomen and their families. Again, let's hope for their sake that they don't choose that year to come down with an expensive medical condition.

Finally, let's make sure that an appropriate number of congressmen feel the financial pain felt by those for whom having health insurance doesn't protect them from financial pain. Seventeen percent of employees with coverage through their employer (see page 7) ended up paying more than 10% of their after-tax income on health expenses such as premiums, co-pays and co-insurance. A whopping 53% of people purchasing non-group private insurance paid more than 10% of their income on health care. So, with the number of people getting health insurance through their employer declining on a regular basis, let's split the difference and dock 10% of the after-tax pay of 35% of congressmen — 35 senators and 152 representatives — and call it a day.

What do we end up with? Two-thirds of elected officials in the legislative branch who either have no health insurance or have reason to be unhappy about it. As the Samuel Johnson quote goes, "(W)hen a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." If congressmen knew that their own physical and financial health were at stake, I'm sure they'd solve the health care problem faster than you can say, "Tea party."

No one can predict exactly when Bernie Madoff will die. But the date of his death, I bet, will come far later than his lawyer says it will.

The question of Madoff's expected lifespan is extremely relevant to next Monday's scheduled sentencing for Madoff, who has pleaded guilty to running a Ponzi scheme that cost more than 1,300 investors a total of more than $13 billion. The 71-year-old Madoff faces a maximum sentence of 150 years, and his victims want him locked up for the rest of his life. Earlier this week, Madoff's lawyer, Ira Lee Sorkin, asked that his client be sentenced to a mere 12 years in jail.

Given that it's hard to think of any white-collar criminal other than Madoff who has caused so much pain to so many people, Sorkin's suggestion of that sentence to the presiding judge in the case, Denny Chin, must seem like the height of gall. But, hey — Sorkin's a lawyer and that's his job: To make unbelievable requests on behalf of his client.

What I find outrageous about Sorkin's letter to Judge Chin isn't the sentence he asks for, but some of the reasoning he uses to back it up. Citing Social Security Administration data, Sorkin says his client has an "approximate" life expectancy of 13 years. "A prison term of 12 years — just short of an effective life sentence — will sufficiently address the goals of deterrence, protecting the public, and promoting respect for the law…." writes Sorkin.

Hmmm. Is twelve years really a near-death sentence for the scammer? I don't think so. First, let's look  at the Social Security life expectancy tables that Sorkin alludes to. Yes, according to the SSA, a 71-year-old male, on average, will live another 12.66 years. But that's on average; one-half of Madoff's cohort will live longer than that. And if, 12 years from now, an 83-year-old Madoff shuffled out of jail, he'd have a one-in-three chance of celebrating his 87th birthday. He'd have a one-in-five chance of making it to 90. Just short of an effective life sentence, my foot.

And the odds of Madoff making it to 90 may even be better than that. Let's look at another document on the SSA's web site — one that Sorkin somehow overlooked in the course of his legal research. This particular item is a 2007 paper by SSA researcher Hilary Waldron entitled "Trends in Mortality Differentials and Life Expectancy for Male Social Security-Covered Workers, by Socioeconomic Status." The punch line of Waldron's paper, as it applies here: Among the guys born around the year Madoff was (1938), the better-than-average earners who made it to their 70th birthday can expect to live until age 87. The lower-than-average earners likely have to settle for 83. Rich guys, in other words, live longer than poor ones. And guess what that means for Madoff.

Now, it may be true that the life-enhancing effects of Madoff's wealth will wear off once he spends a few years behind bars. (Unfortunately, the SSA doesn't provide longevity stats for wealthy crooks who are sent to prison at age 71.) And  it could be argued (in fact, Sorkin does) that  Madoff deserves some leniency for his recent apparent assistance in recovering for his victims some of the money he stole from them over the years. But don't believe that Madoff, a dozen years from now, will be at death's door. A healthy skepticism about the state of his future health is in order.

One of the infinite ways in which you can divide up the world into two types of people is savings behavior. People are either diligent savers or they aren't; likely, you know where you fit in without being told.

But other than the habit of savings, how are savers and spenders different from one another? Recently, I saw some research from HSBC Direct which sheds some light on the subject. In a survey of 1,000 people–two-thirds of whom had household incomes of at least $100,000–the bank found a few interesting differences between the 22% of the population that the bank designates as "active savers" and the not-so-active rest of us. (Click on each of the charts below to see larger-sized versions with more information; in all of them, the red bar signifies active savers while the blue one represents not-so-active ones.)

• Active savers start early. Seventy-three percent of them say that their parents taught them the value of saving money, compared to 56% of the so-so savers.
  

  When learned to save

  Non-savers had a greater  likelihood of being "scared straight" into saving by a bankruptcy or significant debt.

• Active savers are less hedonistic. Maybe that's obvious. But I wanted to point out that active savers are more likely than sluggish
  

  Why people save

  savers to put money away for retirement and a general sense of security, while they're much less likely to sock away funds for a vacation.

• Active savers know their limits. When asked what would improve their current financial situation, they're less likely than their counterparts to say they they could reduce their expenses.
  

  Improving finances

  Hey, they've already reduced them, and they know it.

• Active savers are happier with their current financial situation. Now, are they happy because they're savers, or are they savers because they're happy?
  

  Saver lifestyle & finances

  I don't know. But if you're not an active saver, why not join the club and see if it improves your mood?

Last summer, when I was writing a story about health insurance options for early retirees, I found an incredibly useful resource for individuals trying to obtain health insurance for themselves and/or their families: a web site run by Georgetown University's Health Policy Institute. The web site, operating under the generic-sounding title healthinsuranceinfo.net, was a collection of 51 exhaustive guides to the rights and options that individuals have for obtaining health insurance in each of the states plus the District of Columbia. I found these guides, formally known as the Consumer Guides to Getting and Keeping Health Insurance, extremely valuable in navigating the patchwork of laws and organizations that serve as the health insurance safety net, such as it is, in the US.

Unfortunately, just as my article started arriving in people's homes, healthinsuranceinfo.net went offline, the victim of a funding loss at HPI. And offline it has sat, unavailable to the public for the past few months, gathering dust in an electronic lockbox somewhere.

Until recently, that is. Just recently, healthinsuranceinfo.net came back online, thanks to an emergency grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. HPI says it has also received funding to update 15 of the consumer guides over the summer. America is sorely in need of a healthcare and health-insurance overhaul; until the day that comes about, this is a great place for learning about your choices in today's system.

Some food for thought from President Obama's current investment portfolio, which was revealed last Friday as part of his government-mandated annual financial disclosure report:

1. There's an old bit of investment advice: If you don't have a lot of money, you invest to build your assets. If you already have a lot of money, you invest to protect them. Well, it's the second part of that statement that applies to our president. Judging from the report, he and his immediate family had investments and savings, as of year-end 2008, of at least $1.4 million and as much as $5.9 million. (Sorry about the imprecision there; blame the report's format for the wide range of valuations.) And, boy, is his portfolio safe and liquid. His biggest holding, by far, is his stake in U.S. Treasury bills–somewhere between $1.05 million and $5.1 million. The next biggest chunk is the $100,000 to $250,000 that Barack and Michelle have in their joint checking account. Face it: When either of them uses a debit card to gas up the limo at the 7-11, they don't have to worry about those pesky overdraft fees.

2. The president isn't really into stock-picking. He and the First Lady used to own a few different equity mutual funds; now he owns only one, and it's an index fund: the Vanguard FTSE Social Index fund (VFTSX). President & Mrs. Obama have somewhere between $115,00 and $250,000 in the fund, spread out among three different retirement accounts. And they've suffered like everyone else: The fund has a total return of negative 39% over the past year, slightly worse than that of the S&P 500. Michelle used to have big holdings in the actively-managed Vanguard Wellesley Income (VWINX) and Vanguard Wellington (VWELX) funds, but she apparently got rid of them last year.

3. Face it, when you're President of the United States, your investment objectives and criteria are not like your next-door neighbor's (if indeed you have any neighbors). As much as Obama might be concerned about protecting his wealth–and maybe he isn't, since he'll have a nice pension and plenty of opportunities to make money in retirement–he's got to worry more about how his investments look to other people, and what those investments say about him. That's what they euphemize in financial circles as the "optics" of the situation.

4. On that basis, the optics of Obama's investments look pretty good. By investing in an index fund, he's not making an active bet on a particular company (though he does end up making big bets, for better or worse, on particular industries: The Social Index fund has about 26% of its investments in financial stocks, 27% in information technology, and another 30% in either health care or consumer discretionary). That lone mutual fund invests nearly all its money in U.S. stocks, and it screens companies on the basis of their policies and performance relative to the environment, human rights, sweatshops, bribery and other social issues. Who's going to argue with that? And think about it: With so much of Obama's money in Treasury bills and cash, he's making a big bet on the performance of the U.S. economy and the U.S. dollar. It's like with any money manager: When he's playing with your money, you want him to have a lot of his own assets at risk, too.

Addendum:

The Obamas have socked away somewhere between $100,000 and $200,000 in 529 plans for Sasha and Malia's college education. That's great, but it appears they have put their money in broker-sold plans that charge a 3.5% upfront sales load and have annual expense ratios of around 1.3%. Ouch! Financial planner (and MONEY contributor) Allan Roth suggests they move to lower-expense direct-sold plans, a move that would mean lower fees and more money for the girls' schooling.

Well, you already knew the bad news about your 401(k), but now we have some more specifics about the misery all around you: The median rate of return on 401(k) balances was negative 28.3% last year, according to a study released today by human-resources consulting firm Hewitt Associates. The average 401(k) balance dropped from $79,600 at year-end 2007 to $57,200 at the close of 2008.

Now for the good news: Getting burned by last year's trauma does not appear to have shaken people's belief that it's a good thing to save for retirement. Seventy-four percent of employees participated in their 401(k) plan last year, says Hewitt, roughly the number as did the year before.

And yet, and yet….People are losing their nerve at the margins. The average employee contribution rate last year, says Hewitt, was 7.4%, down from 7.7% the prior year. (In 2004 and 2005, the rate was 7.9%.) Meanwhile, mutual-fund-and-401(k) giant Fidelity–which earlier this year said that average retirement contributions, by dollar amount, had increased slightly in 2008–released numbers today indicating dropoffs in employer and employee contributions in the first quarter of 2009. On average, workers socked away $1,700 pre-tax dollars in their 401(k)s in the first quarter of the year, down 9% from the corresponding quarter one year earlier. Total contributions (that is, employee deposits and employer matches) amounted to $2,780, down 10% from one year earlier.

To what extent the falling dollar amount reflects lower salaries or lower contribution rates is unclear. But what is clear is that workers' allocations to equity are falling–not just because falling stock prices did it for them, but also because they're making the decision for themselves. Hewitt suggests that the biggest-volume days for trading out of stocks were the days that followed the market's biggest drops (averaging negative 4%). Stable-value funds experienced an 11% increase in asset allocation. The average percentage of 401(k) portfolios allocated to stock dropped to just 59%–the lowest figure since Hewitt began tracking that number in 1997. (In 2005, for purposes of comparison, the share in equities was nearly 68%.)

Of course, some of the pullback from stocks may reflect not a vain attempt at return-chasing (or return-fleeing), but a reasoned reassessment of one's risk profile. And some of the cutbacks in retirement savings may reflect not despair, but urgent current needs for cash. But if you've been cutting your retirement allocation and giving up on stocks, you might at least ask yourself the questions: If investing in stocks in your 401(k) was a great idea a year ago, isn't it even a better idea today, when stocks are a lot cheaper and you don't have the assets saved up that you used to?

Given the market's upward move over the past two months, maybe you're finally ready to take a close look at your financial future again. Who knows? Maybe things aren't as bad as you thought during in the throes of March (and last November).

Good news if you're in the mood for this type of exercise. Two free, online tools that can help you sort out your finances have just been released. One is ESPlanner Basic (basic.esplanner.com), a stripped-down version of a planner developed by Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff; the other is SimpliFi (www.simplifi.net), the first direct-to-consumer version of a planning program from a company that has been providing financial planning services to credit unions since 2006.

Based on my test-drive of each of the planners, I prefer Kotlikoff's. Despite the "basic" in its name, it feels very advanced. Like the for-pay version, which Kotlikoff sells for $150 or $200 (based on its feature package), ESPlanner Basic lets you enter information about your salary (and expected salary trajectory), your savings and your big expenses (think housing & college education). Then it shows you a year-by-year model of your inflows/outflows, along with recommended amounts for your savings and discretionary spending. It’s a lot more detailed than your usual online planner, and it’s pretty easy to use and figure out. (My biggest problem with the program: It didn't make it clear that, when I input projected education costs, I was supposed to enter annual expenses, not total expenses; as a result, the savings it recommended, until I figured this out, were ridiculously high.) What's great about the program is how much it lets you fiddle with underlying assumptions. You can plug in different savings rates, retirement ages, investment returns and salary trajectories; you can even forecast a cutback in your Social Security benefits. Just re-run your plan and you can see how the different numbers shake out. The biggest limitation with ESPlanner Basic? Your profile lasts for only 24 hours. After then, you have to re-enter all your numbers–or pay up for the expensive versions, which offer greater flexibility in what you can input and track.

SimpliFi is for those who like a simpler life. It nicely organizes your life into Things You Own, Things That Grow and Things You Owe; once you put in the numbers describing your present situation, it assigns you a letter grade based on its judgment of your progress toward financial goals, along with a to-do list to get you going. While SimpliFi's simplicity can make things easier, I took issue with what I thought were unrealistically low death ages for the couple I input; my suspicion was that their retirement would last longer than SimpliFi projected, thus requiring more money in savings. I was also puzzled by the asset allocation the program prescribed for a retirement account; based on a required return of 7.62%, SimpliFi recommended a portfolio comprising 40% money market funds and 23% bonds, with the rest in stocks. Putting aside the issue of whether that allocation is too short on stocks for someone who's going to retire in 19 years–which I think it is–I can't imagine how I'm supposed to get a 7.62% return with nearly two-thirds of my money in cash and fixed income.

Well, Schwab can't do anything about the stock market, but the the financial services company can make it cheaper for people to invest. This morning, the mutual fund operation of Charles Schwab made deep cuts in the expense ratios of its equity index funds and lowered costs throughout its fund family for individual investors.

The news comes only one month after Morningstar forecast that mutual fund expense ratios will rise in 2009.

Under its new pricing, Schwab is giving all investors in a given fund the same expense ratio, whether they're making the minimum initial investment of $100 or investing a larger amount. For example, expenses for a small investment in Schwab's popular Dividend Equity fund will drop from 1.04% to 0.89%, a ratio previously available only to people with a minimum investment of $50,000. Ratios on other funds will have higher drops: For small investments in the Schwab Fundamental U.S. Large Company Index fund, expenses will go from 0.59% to 0.35%.

Playing a game of expense-ratio limbo with other brand-name mutual fund giants–and with ETFs, such as the SPDR S&P 500, that are stealing dollars from index mutual funds–Schwab is claiming the industry's lowest expenses in three categories of index mutual funds: the S&P 500, the total US stock market, and small-cap stocks. For example, Schwab's S&P 500 Index fund, which used to have an expense ratio of 0.36% for small accounts, now has an expense ratio of 0.09%. The expense ratio for the Vanguard 500 Index fund, which has a minimum initial investment of $3,000, is 0.15% for most individuals, while the Fidelity Spartan 500 Index–a $10,000-minimum fund–has an expense ratio of 0.10%.

"This is not a promotional offer or anything like that," said Schwab's Peter Crawford, senior v.p. of investment management services, at a press conference Tuesday morning. "These are permanent reductions."

Granted, Schwab's index fund expenses may not have the absolutely lowest expense ratios out there. If you're lucky enough to have at least $100,000 to invest, your Vanguard 500 Index Admiral Shares will have a ratio of 0.07%. The SPDR S&P 500, by the way, has an expense ratio of 0.0945%, but you'll have to pay brokerage commissions on any transactions.

Keep in mind, also, that some of these numbers won't exactly right all the wrongs the stock market has recently inflicted on your portfolio. On an investment of $10,000, a 0.09% ratio on Schwab's 500 index amounts to expenses of  $9 a year, compared to the $15 you'd be paying if you were holding Vanguard's index shares. In other words, you'd be saving yourself $6 a year. That's not quite enough to turn your retirement picture around, but maybe it would make an appreciable difference in your investments given enough time and money in the market.

And who knows? Maybe this will be the first round in a mutual-fund price war. That's a battle all investors would be happy to see.

If financial misery loves company, you've got a surprising amount of it among wealthy folks–the people who you'd think would feel comfortably insulated from the current economic crisis.

That's a key takeaway from a survey just released by the Phoenix Companies, a financial services firm which conducts an annual poll of well-off Americans–those whose net worth, excluding the value of their primary home, amounts to at least $1 million.

In the survey, conducted by Harris Interactive, participants were probed about one of those primal fears that affect anyone thinking about retirement–the possibility that your money won't last as long as you do. Specifically, they were asked whether they agreed with the statement, "I am very concerned about outliving my money in retirement."

The response was surprising. Forty-five percent of these millionaires said yes: They either "agreed" or "agreed strongly" with that idea.

Okay, maybe you're thinking that's not so surprising. Say, for example, you're a 55-year-old with $1 million, you have a mortgage, you have three kids to send to college, and you're wondering whether you'll be laid off next week. In that case, One…Million…Dollars may seem laughably inadequate, just as it was in the first Austin Powers movie.

But you can't explain away all the numbers that easily. Thirty-five percent of respondents worth $5 million or more were concerned about outliving their money. Think about it: One-third of the people worth at least five million bucks are just as worried retirement as you or I (assuming, of course, that you, like me, aren't among the penta-millionaires). If you ever needed proof that, once you're above poverty level, money doesn't buy peace of mind–well, there it is.

Also surprising is the pessimism among younger millionaires: Sixty-one percent of the rich folk age 45 or younger fear outliving their money, compared to a mere 32% of millionaires age 65 or older–the very age group for whom running out of money in retirement is a real, immediate concern, not just a theoretical possibility somewhere off in the future. And, again, it's not a question of money: Sixty-percent of younger millionaires worth more than $2 million are worriers, compared to 42% of older millionaires worth less than $2 million.

Why are the youngsters so glum? It's likely a bunch of reasons, says Walt Zultowski, senior v.p. of research and concept development at Phoenix. Thanks to advances in medical technology, these younger millionaires will likely live to an advanced age, and thus have to pay for an extended retirement. They're worried they'll have to support elderly parents, too. They're expecting Social Security benefits to be cut back. They're worried about major economic downturns between now and their retirement. And they're getting hit with a vivid, first-hand look at an older generation forced to scale back its retirement plans because of an economic meltdown.

So what's more justified–youthful pessimism about retirement savings, or elderly optimism on the same subject? The answer, unfortunately, is unclear. "The younger folks' concerns are legitimate," says Zultowski. "On the other hand, maybe they underestimate their own earnings power and the power of wise investments over several decades."