Thursday, March 11, 2010

The retirement funds obsession continued

Another one of those reports bemoaning how the young generation is not heeding the call of experts and putting their money in retirement accounts (401k, IRAs and money market accounts). Well what do you expect from them since they are deep in debt and every money that they bring in has to go either to pay their daily bills, rent, car payments (if they have), education loans (a huge one) etc. It is not that these people don’t know how to save but it is just that they don’t have enough to save anyway. With the escalating cost of health care premiums and prices of every thing going up, it is truly remarkable that they are barely making ends meet. And if you have a family then you should forget about it. The whole notion of saving is that after all expenses are taken care of then you can put some in your retirement funds but people are going overboard with their expenses and they are trying to put their daily expenses on credit cards.

Then these same people are looking for jobs amid all the recession and outsourcing so it is a great achievement that you can find a job where you can save enough to put into your retirement accounts. It is a nice notion to have some money saved for the rainy day but for some folks rainy day is here and almost every day. So instead of sounding an alarm of low retirement funds (and paying some financial guy to tell them what they already know) and advising what to do (since advising is always easy),we should be creating good paying jobs so that we can fulfill all our financial responsibilities.

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