Social Security. The Social Security Administration's retirement planning Web page has some tools to help you sort through options such as the best age for you to apply for benefits. Calculators tell what sort of monthly payment to expect. And you'll discover how important it is to keep working as long as possible - since benefits are based on averaging 35 years of your earnings, even if there are years you earned nothing.

www.ssa.gov/retire2/

Someone not comfortable working online can download and print a 62-page retirement planning guide from this Web page at the U.S. Department of Labor site. www.dol.gov/ebsa/publications/NRTOC.html

Yahoo guides. How-to guides at Yahoo Finance's retirement site provide advice on maintaining control of your retirement assets, and on the important tax implications of designating beneficiaries for your IRAs and other retirement accounts.

http://finance.yahoo.com/retirement

Must-knows. Those cards at the Motley Fool have a lot of retirement information available on their site. This page claims to sum it all up in five "retirement must-knows." These include, "No one's got your back. Sorry 'bout that," and "It's never too early - or too late - to warm up your nest egg."

www.fool.com/retirement/retirement01.htm?source=ifltnvsnv0000001

Best places. Instead of reading somebody else's list of the best places to retire, you can go to this U.S. News & World Report page, choose factors that are important to you, and get rankings from among 1,000 locations based on your preferences about the weather, cost of housing, crime statistics, health-care facilities, and other things. Our effort turned up a beach town in northern Florida that sounded just about right.

www.usnews.com/directories/retirement