For folks fortunate to have an employer match in their 401k plan, failing to contribute would be like passing up free money. That’s a powerful incentive to save. Now, some officials in Washington want more people to have that incentive…

One of the hot new solutions to the retirement-savings problem is the Automatic IRA. (Sometimes it’s also called the Universal IRA, but see yesterday’s post to learn the problems with that name.) There’s one group that doesn’t like it, though:…

Dallas Salisbury, president of the Employee Benefit Research Institute, has long been a go-to numbers guy for anyone writing about retirement issues. On Tuesday, he urged reporters to use data to knock down myths and cut through political rhetoric.

One of…

Our National Press Foundation group heard a lot today about the problems that low-income people have in saving for retirement — or, really, in saving at all. Wilhelmina Leigh, a senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and…

We journalists got a gentle chiding today from Stephen Goss, chief actuary of the Social Security Administration. If you’re going to talk about a problem, it’s important to define it correctly, and we seem to spend a lot of time…

A discussion of children’s issues was about the last thing we expected at a retirement seminar. But Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, says America can’t address the concerns of the older generation without affecting the youngest generation, too:

It’s children who…

Bernard Winograd is executive vice president of Prudential, which sells many of the financial pieces that Americans need for retirement. Even from the point of view of someone who sells insurance, mutual funds and annuities, though, the U.S. model of retirement savings is…