I've gotten lots of valuable help from your column over the years, but have always wondered about your personal retirement strategy. Have you been faithful to your own advice? -- Jim K., Madison, Wis.

I haven't said much about my own finances in the more than 1,000 Ask the Expert columns I've written over the past 13 years. Everyone's situation is different, so I wouldn't want people to assume they should follow a particular strategy or invest in a certain way just because "The Expert" has done so.

But since I'll be leaving MONEY at the end of this month, I thought it would be appropriate to share the overall approach I've taken to retirement planning during my 26 years at MONEY in the hope that readers might apply it not in every particular, but in a general way to their own planning.

I'm not going to get into the nitty-gritty details. My wife would have my head if I started divulging account balances and such. Rather, I'll break down my retirement-planning efforts into two broad categories, specifically: What I've Done Reasonably Well and What I Could Have Done Better.

What I've done reasonably well

The single most effective thing I've done is save on a regular basis.

Whether my zeal for saving reflects an innate impulse, a reaction to my family's precarious financial situation as I was growing up, a rational decision to stash away money for the future or a combination of these, I can't say. But I can say that for whatever reason I've always tried to live below my means and contribute the max (or as close as I could get to it) to tax-advantaged retirement plans.

For example, as a freelance writer prior to joining MONEY, I opened and funded a Keogh account and then a SEP-IRA, both of which are retirement savings plans for the self-employed.

Once I became a MONEY staffer, I made it a point to take advantage of virtually every opportunity my employer offered to save, including the company 401(k) plan, which I funded to the max pretty much every year.

I also applied the 401(k) system of automatic payroll deductions to saving outside of tax-advantaged plans. In the late '90s, I set up an automatic investing plan, directing a mutual fund company to transfer $300 a month (later increased to $500) from my checking account to a stock fund. I felt a pinch at first, but after a few months I adjusted quickly to having a little less spendable income.

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Our expert reveals his personal retirement strategy