A majority of Americans with 401(k)-type savings accounts are accumulating debt faster than they are setting aside money for retirement, further undermining the nation’s troubled system for old-age saving, a new report has found.Three in five workers with defined contribution accounts are “debt savers,” according to the report released Thursday, meaning their increasing mortgages, credit card balances and installment loans are outpacing the amount of money they are able to save for retirement.
The imbalance is expanding even as policymakers are encouraging people to set aside more by offering generous tax breaks and automatically enrolling workers in retirement accounts that in some cases automatically escalate the amount of money over time.
Currently, workers with retirement savings accounts put aside more than 11 percent of their pay for retirement — 5 percent in their own accounts, and 6.2 percent in Social Security.
Despite that — and despite the $2.5 trillion the report says employers have poured into defined contribution accounts from 1992 to 2012 — the retirement readiness of most Americans has been slipping, according to the report by HelloWallet, a D.C. firm that offers technology-based financial advice to workers and conducts research of economic behavior.“Policy has tunnel vision. It tends to tackle problems on a piecemeal basis. The impact of policy on consumer finances is a bit like playing a game of Whac-A-Mole,” said Matt Fellowes, founder and chief executive of HelloWallet and a former Brookings Institution scholar. “We raised the victory flag as people increased retirement contributions, but in reality the ability of people to retire is a function of lots of different variables, most important of which is what they are doing on the other side of the ledger.”
Via: Washington Post
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