“The Retirement Savings Fiasco”

Rachel Black has an op-ed on Time.com today. “The Retirement Savings Fiasco” explores the consequences of the lack of emergency savings and the resulting, unfortunate phenomenon of early, penalized withdrawals from retirement accounts.

For thousands of furloughed federal workers, the 16-day government shutdown wasn’t just a public display of Congressional dysfunction— it was the trigger of a personal financial crisis. According to the administrators of the Thrift Savings Plan (the federal version of the 401k), over 8,200 federal employees made hardship withdrawals from their retirement accounts during the shutdown.

But that statistic is paltry compared to the number of all Americans with a 401 (k)-like retirement plan that unexpectedly withdrew cash back in 2010: one in four.

Those numbers expose a toxic trend – and a major policy failure ­– that is threatening the finances of families across the country: Millions of Americans won’t be able to live off of their savings in retirement because they’re surviving off of them right now.

Rachel then explains how the Financial Security Credit, a flexible tax credit for working families who commit to save, could help to solve the retirement savings fiasco. Click here to read the whole thing.