The Retirement Challenge: Will You Sink or Swim?

Lesson 19 Should You Contribute to It?

The knee-jerk advice from the media and financial planner community is to contribute the maximum you can afford to your 401(k) plan. After all, at their best, retirement plans offer some significant advantages. However, not all plans capture all the potential benefits, and some squander them entirely with high costs and poor investment choices.

None of the private pension plans, whether defined benefit or defined contribution plans, will work unless the plan sponsors/fiduciaries do their job. There is precious little evidence that this is happening. Although there are some exceptions, we also see massive failure of fiduciary standards. A huge number of private pensions are disgracefully bad, incapable ...