In the big picture, Americans are borrowing less and saving more. But at RegionsBank branches in the St. Louis area, customers are doing more of both. Sally Roth, the bank’s area president, says that loans are up 9 percent and…

When President Barack Obama announced four measures to encourage savings, one of them represented a victory for a non-profit group that’s trying to find ways for low-income Americans to save. Since 2005, the Doorways to Dreams Fund has been saying that…

A reader called last week with an interesting question: Should he sell his Series I U.S. Savings Bonds, on which the yield reset to zero percent as of May 1?

My answer: probably not. There certainly are drawbacks to the current…

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…

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…

If one spends much time reading and thinking about retirement-savings plans, as I did while writing today’s column on the problems with the 401k system, one conclusion is inevitable: There are no easy answers.

Alicia Munnell, director of Boston College’s Center for…

Bill Greiner, chief investment officer for UMB Bank, says that the U.S. economy will be in recession for most of the next year and that unemployment will exceed 8 percent before it’s over.

His downbeat assessment of the economy came during…