• kerrigan778@lemmy.world
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    6 hours ago

    Y’know there’s this thing called Target Retirement Date ETFs right? Also, aren’t most 401ks either managed or extremely restricted towards very safe investment options?

    • grue@lemmy.world
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      37 minutes ago

      Y’know there’s this thing called Target Retirement Date ETFs right?

      Of course I do.

      But a surprisingly large number of people either don’t, or don’t understand it and are terrified of making a mistake, so they end up making the much worse mistake of leaving their 401k contributions in the cash sweep account. (I think in recent years 401ks have started putting contributions in target-date funds by default instead of making people affirmatively choose it, but still, a lot of people lost a lot of years of growth to that issue alone.)

      And again, that’s not even talking about the people who simply don’t [think they] make enough money to contribute at all, but would have had money going to their retirement if it had been in the form of a pension that they never had the option to decline and get in their paycheck instead. I have never heard of a 401k that forces you to put money away in order to ensure that your retirement is actually adequately funded, the way that pension plans used to handle automatically.