Roger Wohlner is among the most well-known of financialbloggers, having been recognized as a “top blogger” by severalmedia outlets, including The Wall Street Journal.

While his primary audience may be the retail investor, you cancount professionals among his readers, too. And with goodreason.

As you might expect from someone who straddles the line betweenwriting and serving as a financial professional, Roger can providevaluable industry insights in a way mere journalists cannot.

If you’re interested in discovering some of his wisdom yourself,take a look at my interview with him (“Exclusive Interview with Roger Wohlner,”FiduciaryNews.com, January 19, 2016).

In that interview, Roger offered a very intriguing idea when itcomes to target-date funds.

He suggested that while there might be justification for youngerretirement savers to use a generic target-date investmentphilosophy, as an investor ages a target-risk investment philosophymakes more sense.

Let’s explore why this approach appeals to the intuitivesense.

First let’s tackle the state of mind of younger retirementsavers. Often, they aren’t even aware of the importance of savingfor their retirement.

It’s not because they’re dull, it’s mostly because there are alot of competing priorities and not a lot of money to go aroundaddressing those priorities. Early on, there are student loans.

Then, in some seemingly more random order, there’s a homemortgage, the costs of getting married, and the costs of raising afamily.

With budgets tight, there’s no need for the young retirementsaver to get too fancy when it comes to investing their retirementsavings.

For all the problems associated with target-date funds, thosewith target dates forty to fifty years in the future should all benearly fully invested in equities.

Setting aside what kinds of equities they invest in, theimportant thing is that they’re nearly fully invested in equities.End of story.

So, TDFs do have merit for these younger investors. At thispoint in their lives, a “one-size-fits-all” “set-it-and-forget”approach fits neatly within the mesh of all their other financialpriorities.

Things begin to get a little bit more complicated as oneages.

With a decade or two of adulthood under their belts,not-so-young people tend to have accrued enough varied financialexperience that it becomes apparent one size no longer fits all.Two big savings goals consume most of their thinking: retirementand college.

This doesn’t mean they can ignore short-term cash flow needs. Inbrief, life gets a lot harder.

As life gets harder, as peoples’ situations branch off along aspectrum ranging from “well-to-do” to “scraping-by,” it no longerremains valid to accept a generic date-based investment philosophy.These middle-aged folks find themselves and their financial needstransitioning to a risk-based strategy.

In other words, your date of birth matters less than the presentvalue of your net assets and the future value of your current cashflow.

You can easily imagine where two different fifty year-olds withtwo different financial charts. One, who is relatively wealth andwell prepared, needn’t take undue risk. The other, who isrelatively poor and less prepared, has a return required thatdemand more risk.

Same age, different portfolio.

A target-date fund is simply a non-starter in this situation. Infact, it’s not in the best interests of these two investors to evenoffer them something labeled as a “target-date” fund.

Such an offer falsely implies only their age--not their personalfinancial situation--is all they need to know when selecting an“appropriate” investment for their retirement savings.

Notice how I snuck the phrase “best interests” in there. That’sright; the use of target-date funds may soon become an importantfiduciary issue.

When that occurs, you can expect we will begin to see a “civilwar” of sorts between these two competing investmentphilosophies.