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This is Motley Full Answers.

I'm Alison Southwick, and I'm joined, as always, by Robert Brokamp, personal finance expert here at The Motley Fool.

This week, we're getting into the Olympic spirits with our biennial competition, pitting nation against nation for economic supremacy.

We're also going to talk about how your home can prop up your portfolio and

pump up your retirement. All that and more on this week's episode of Motleyful Answers.

So, bro, what's up this week? Well, as you may know, or may not, how to factor your home

into a retirement plan has sort of long been a conundrum among retirement planning experts. On the one hand,

for most Americans, their home is their biggest asset. So you'd think, well, of course,

you should somehow factor that into your retirement plan. On the other hand, it's also

the roof over your head, and it hasn't always been easy to turn your house into cash,

and you don't want to play it too crazy with it. You want to protect it. So a lot of folks have said, actually, you should leave it completely out of your retirement

plan.

So people don't know exactly what to do with it, but a couple of articles I read recently

provided what I thought were some interesting idea of how to factor it into your overall financial

plan.

So the first article was published on MarketWatch.com from Mark Holbert.

And the title gives you a clue, and that is, owning a home can give you a place to hide from a

bare market for stocks. And this actually was published in January. It's sort of an update of an article

...