The good news about the Internet is the information we can get our cursors on instantly; the bad news is the information we can get our heads around instantly, but without any way of gauging accuracy, relevance or completeness. This is particularly evident in the financial-investment-retirement world, where thousands of Web sites tell us how to do things and why, and why things work the way they do and how. Few gurus explain why and how certain concepts and plans of action just may not work the way they are supposed to.

You don't need to read very far before the fingernail-screeching 401(k) chalkboard becomes deafening. For example, do they provide: 1) free money from employers, 2) lower taxable income, 3) retirement without any worries, or are they, 4) one of the most popular retirement plans?

The inadequacies I'm talking about may seem nitpicky at first blush, but the misconceptions and invalid expectations they nurture in inexperienced investors are mind-blowing.

Employers are providing a valuable benefit in the form of a defined contribution savings plan, a self-directed investment program that has little in common with defined benefit retirement and pension plans. It's not free money at all. It's a clever, goal-directed, business expense that is both touchy-feely visible to you and far less expensive for your boss. It's a good deal, but not a retirement plan.

Although it is true that you do not pay taxes on your contributions during your earning years, you will undoubtedly pay through both nostrils when you retire. If your karma is off, you may find yourself trying to retire at a time when the stock market is not in a party mood and your mutual funds just don't seem as secure as you thought they were a few months earlier.

Similarly, more fortunate retirees (those who get the "gelt" during a rally) generally fail to lock in a guaranteed stream of income, and find themselves in the same cyclical conundrum as their less market-timely brethren. The money worries continue well after retirement; the taxes become much larger than anyone ever anticipates; the misconception that the 401(k) is a retirement plan continues.

No, this isn't just semantics. The differences between retirement programs and savings programs are very real, extremely fundamental, and politically incomprehensible to legislators.

Retirement programs are income machines designed to support people, not to make them feel wealthy, investment savvy or temporarily tax-free. Pension plans produce fixed amounts of monthly income that don't change appreciably when dot.coms, real estate, CDOs or index funds self-destruct.

The investments contained in a pension plan are designed to produce income, and are managed by trustees who are experienced in constructing safe, conservative, diversified programs that are just as boring as they can possibly be. Most pension plan benefits are calculated as a percentage of the amount earned while employed.

Defined benefit pension programs are rapidly becoming extinct -- corporate America can no longer afford them, along with 50 percent of total Social Security contributions, employee health care and CEOs who collect $50 million per year from their unwary shareholders. But those that have survived (notably, labor union plans, retirement annuity contracts and the Congressional Pension System) produce monthly income checks without any problems whatsoever. And here we thought our congressional leaders were incompetent -- not when it comes to their own benefit package.

How do we make the 401(k) plans provide more retirement security?

That's not difficult. Simply dictate that all plans require participants to invest at least 60 percent of their assets in income securities that can be withdrawn "in kind" at retirement.

Until that happens, we just have to educate people better and make the appropriate distinctions between an as-speculative-as-you-care-to-make-it savings and investment plan and a pretty-much-guaranteed retirement or pension plan.