Life expectancy at birth is now seventy-tw- years for males and seventy-nine for females, thanks to improvements in our living environment and advances in medical care. The older population those age sixty-five and over are the fastest growing segment of the population. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, by 2030, one in five Americans will be a senior citizen. Now people can expect to live twenty to twenty-five years after retirement. With growing uncertainty about Social Security and the shift from employer to employee responsibility for retirement saving, people are starting at younger ages to save ahead for retirement. Planning for retirement is usually longorange, and mutual funds lend themselves better to longorange planning than to shortoterm investing. The security, flexibility and convenience of mutual funds are particularly attractive to investors planning for retirement. Mutual funds now have more assets than banks and insurance. The purpose of this course is to introduce the student to Mutual funds and the interrelationship between mutual funds, insurance and ethics.
