Those are obvious marketing ploys to attract new customers, and the surveys attract little notice partly because everyone knows that people do not save enough anyway. The exact figure is that 56 percent of households are behind where they should be in saving for a comfortable retirement. What makes this survey valuable is that no standards were set on what constitutes a comfortable retirement. Those surveyed were asked if they were saving enough to maintain their current standard of living. That reveals something important.
People know what their situation is, more so than the sponsoring organizations had assumed.
And if they know they aren't saving enough, they must believe there is little or nothing they can do about it. And that disturbs the leaders at the Consumer Federation of America. Not enough people are aware of employer-sponsored plans for retirement savings. Or if their employers do not have plans, too many people are not aware of individual retirement accounts with deferred income-tax provisions, or the Roth IRAs with no income taxes due in retirement years. This pessimism is the greatest challenge.