To find assistance, I've been trying out an impressive new service on the Internet that offers sophisticated, personalized, unbiased financial advice for a very modest fee. It's based on a complex computer model that tries to anticipate how your current investments in a 401(k) plan will perform between now and the time you expect to retire.

The service, Financial Engines (www.financialengines.com), was co-founded by Nobel Prize-winning economist Bill Sharpe. He helped develop the computer-modeling system it's based on after years of consulting for big pension funds and other large financial entities. Financial Engines is an effort to offer the same tools to consumers in an easy-to-use package.

The service not only projects the performance of your 401(k) investments but also gives you specific advice on which funds within your401(k) you should buy and sell, and in what proportions, to meet your goals. It then tracks your holdings every day. None of the advice is generic. It's based on your actual holdings, the actual choices available in your own 401(k) -- or a similar plan -- and your own goals.

Generally, I'm pretty suspicious of computerized services that purport to replace humans with automated approaches. And I suspect that hiring a really first-rate financial adviser would be better than relying on Financial Engines alone. The trouble is, most people with 401(k) plans don't have any advisers. Others may have a mediocre adviser, or one who is mainly interested in selling them insurance or other financial products.

So Financial Engines is hoping to fill a huge gap by offering computerized advice to the clueless. There are others in this category, including Directadvice.com, and some online services offered by providers of 401(k) funds. But Financial Engines stands out in several respects.

FIRST, THE Financial Enginesservice uses a clean, easily understood interface. Second, it asks for very little input from the user. You don't have to scour the house for all your bills, bank statements and other records, then answer a long series of questions. You also don't have to make your own guesses about future inflation rates or market performance.

All you have to do is type in some basic information about yourself and put down the age at which you hope to retire and the annual retirement income you seek. Then just type in the names of the mutual funds offered by your 401(k) plan and your own current holdings among those funds.

Third, Financial Engines is unusual in that it tells you the odds that your current 401(k) investments will actually yield the retirement income you want at the age at which you want it. For instance, the service told me that my current approach had only about a 40% chance of meeting my goals. It illustrates this not only with numbers but also with weather symbols: cloudy for low odds, sunny for highodds. It even projects high, low and medium levels for annual retirement income and for the total value of your 401(k) in the future.

Financial Engines is able to project these outcomes by running your personal investments and goals through thousands of economic scenarios built into its computer model - scenarios that include a wide range of possible market and economic developments over the coming decades. The model doesn't purport to know which developments will occur, only to test how your investments are likely to do over the range of possibilities, based on its extensive database of the characteristics of 15,000 mutual funds.

The Service offers these projections for free. For $15 a quarter, it will also give you specific advice on how to rearrange your 401(k) holdings to improve your odds, especially if you're willing to experiment with different risk factors, retirement ages and incomes, and savings rates. I was able to improve my odds to over 80% by making some simple adjustments that resulted in arearranged investment pattern. As I moved little sliders to adjust my risk tolerance and other factors, the odds were recalculated before my eyes.

Finally, Financial Engines is completely independent. It takes no ads, sells no products and receives no commission from any of the funds it recommends. Its only revenue comes from fees from consumers, and from 401(k) providers who buy its service wholesale to offer to plan participants. The company also says it will never reveal, sell or share your personal financialinformation.

Of course, Financial Engines has some limits and drawbacks. The biggest is that it can offer detailed advice only on the portion of your assets in a 401(k) plan. You can enter outside holdings, like stock and bank accounts, and Financial Engines will take them into account when making projections - but it offers no advice on how to manage these holdings. Another limitation is that it helps you plan only for retirement, not for other goals, such as sending children to college. Thecompany plans to address both these weaknesses in future versions.

Financial Engines has no track record, unlike some human advisers. But for me, using it was an eye-opening experience, and I'm willing to bet on the competence of a Nobel-prize winner and his computer model.

(www.ptech.wsj.com)