Simple advice can create a lot of problems that are not so simple to fix. One of the worst examples is the advice that age should play a central role in investment allocations. Not only is much of this "advice" outdated, it is far too generic to be useful to most investors. Follow this advice and you may just find yourself running short of money late in life. (For related reading, take a look at Retirement: Which Generations Are The Best Savers?)
Today's 65 Isn't Yesterday's 65
A lot of investment advice is predicated on what might be called a life-cycle theory of investing. The idea here is that people go through predictable stages of their financial lives, accumulating more assets than savings in the early years, saving more in the high-earning years of middle age, and then dissaving throughout retirement.
Things have changed, though. Long careers at a single employer are less common, and people are also living longer than ever before. Making it to age 80 is not all that uncommon now, even though much of the retirement advice out there is predicated on old data. What this all boils down to is this - today's 65 isn't like yesterday's 65 and most workers are significantly UNDER-saving for what it is likely to be their real lifespan.
Your Number Isn't Your Number
One of the more dangerous ideas out there is that a person's age should correlate to the percentage of their portfolio that should be in bonds. In other words, a 30-year old should have a 30% allocation to bonds, while a 65-year old should be 65% allocated to bonds. In actual practice, this advice is only solid at the absolute extremes - a newborn should indeed have a zero allocation to bonds, and a centenarian probably should have a 100% allocation to bonds.
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