Is Your 401(k) Kinda Bullsh*t?
The headline of a recent article didn’t pose that as a question. And that should make you think. The article , penned by a not-yet-30-year old, was mostly negative on the nation’s primary private retirement savings vehicle, but to my read, that wasn’t her fault. Rather, it was the net result of the feedback she got from a number of what we might consider the “usual suspects” who garner headlines that bash the 401(k), including (at least indirectly) the man the mainstream media credits with being its “father” (trust me, there’s more to it than that). One of the folks she talked to was yours truly – and while I clearly wasn’t persuasive enough to overturn (completely) the cynicism with which I sensed she came to our conversation (at one point she went so far as to say, “you’re a lot more positive about the 401(k) than anyone else I’ve talked to”). In the course of our conversation we covered a lot of ground – the origins of the 401(k), why traditional pe...