Dr. Mike Walden, North Carolina Cooperative Extension economist in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at N.C. State University, responds:

"For a long time, experts have told people who are saving for retirement that what you do is the following. When you're young and you have a lot of years ahead of you for your investments to work, that's the time to take more risks. That's probably the time to put more of the funds into the stock market, for example. Then, however, as you get closer to your retirement date, you gradually move those more risky funds into safer investments, like maybe bonds and CDs. But to do this, you have to actively manage those monies. Well, a target date investment fund is one that says, look, we'll do all that for you. You just give us the money and we'll invest the money, and we will move that money to safety as you get closer to your target date - hence the term target date - your target date for retirement. So you don't have to worry about anything about making sure that, oh, when I'm 40, I've got to reduce my stock exposure by 10 percent, something like that. The fund will gradually do it for you. And therefore this will be a fund that will be safer because it will recognize that you do have to do these changes over time. So these have become very popular. One issue we have seen recently, however, is because this recession has been so devastating for virtually all kinds of investments, it really hasn't mattered because people who have had their investment funds in what they considered to be fairly safe corporate bonds have suffered as well as people who've had their money in the stock market. So I guess the bottom line here is that target date funds aren't something that you can just forget as an investor. You have to track those just as if you were managing your money on your own."