During the month of October, professional financial planners will provide free advice at special one-off Financial Planning Day events in several cities across the country. Bring whatever financial questions you might have, and invite your friends and family to attend.

This all-volunteer group of planners is partnering with city governments to offer no-strings-attached financial advice without selling their services or handing out business cards. They won’t even be using branded pens and paper from the companies they work for.

You can get personalized advice on a variety of areas – retirement planning, credit and debt, budgeting, investments, taxes, insurance, estate planning and small business finances, among many others. Planners will also present classroom workshops addressing key personal finance topics.

Free packets of financial information will be available, as well. Can’t attend any of the Financial Planning Days events? The publications in those packets are also available online:

• You Can Organize and Simplify Your Financial Life: A How-to Guide
• Saving and Investing: A Roadmap to Your Financial Security
• Smart Saving for College - Better Buy Degrees
• Guide to Disability Income Insurance
• Guide to Long Term Care Insurance
• Savings Fitness
• Consumer Guide to Financial Self-Defense

Find out more about Financial Planning Days.

Choosing when to retire is an important decision, but it’s also a personal choice and one you should carefully consider.

When’s the best time? There is no one-size-fits-all answer.

Social Security offers a list of factors to consider in When To Start Receiving Retirement Benefits. You’ll learn:

• How your monthly benefit amount can differ based on the age at which you start receiving benefits;
• How your decision could affect your family;
• How you can retire and continue working; and
• How you can get estimates of your benefit amounts online at Social Security’s website, www.socialsecurity.gov.

The Social Security website offers several tools to help you plan for your retirement, including an online Retirement Estimator to get immediate and personalized retirement benefit estimates. The estimator is a convenient and secure financial planning tool, allowing you to create “what if” scenarios. For instance, you can change your “stop work” dates or expected future earnings to create and compare different retirement options. Then when you’re ready, you can apply online for your retirement benefits.

Learn more about how you can start planning for your retirement and order your free copy of When To Start Receiving Retirement Benefits.

There’s no such thing as a quick way out of debt, but there are realistic steps you can take to get debt under control.

If you had only a few moments to evacuate your home and could not return for several days or even weeks, would you have access to cash, banking services and the personal identification you need to conduct your day-to-day financial life?

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) offers these tips to make sure you’re financially prepared if disaster strikes:

• Periodically review your insurance coverage to make sure you know what is or isn’t covered.
• Keep copies of your ATM/debit cards in an emergency kit in case you can’t access your actual cards.
• Keep your bank account numbers in a safe place that you can access.
• Consider keeping some cash on hand in your emergency kit.
• Have easy access to phone numbers for financial institutions.

To get more tips on how to make sure you’re financial prepared if there’s a disaster, download and order your free copies of Protecting Your Finances if a Disaster Strikes: Are You Prepared?

These educational comic strips from Kids.gov illustrate ways everyone in the family can pitch in to save money.