Four New Retirement Saving & Planning Tools?

Retirement planning can be daunting. You make a lot of assumptions about where you’ll be financially decades down the road.  You assume that the tax laws won’t do anything crazy and that the financial markets will continue to operate as they have for decades.  You also debate whether Social Security funds are going to shrivel up and blow away by the time you’re ready for them.

Although retirement planning is not simple it’s still very necessary to help give you some financial security in your later years.  The Obama administration made some proposals in their weekly address that are intended to help with retirement savings and education.  Here they are:

1) Allow employees of small businesses to automatically enroll in a 401(k) or an individual retirement account.

2)  Offer the option to receive your federal tax refund as a savings bond.

3) Enable employees to put payments for unused vacation and sick days into their retirement plan if they wish.

4) Retirement Planning Education. The IRS and the Treasury Department are working on a simplified guide and website to help translate the financial rules into a format that’s easier to understand.

I think finding ways to allow small businesses to let their employees automatically put money into a retirement account is a good idea.  The savings bond for your tax refund sounds good, I wonder how many people will actually do it?  I would love to put my unused sick days towards my retirement plan but I wonder how much that will cost companies and what impact that will have on them.  I don’t think financial education is a bad idea but I wonder how many people will make use of the site and how much it will cost to build and promote it.

What are your thoughts on the retirement savings and education proposals?

Ben Edwards, the founder of Money Smart Life, saved up enough to buy a Nintendo back when he was 12 years old. When he used the money to buy shares of Wal-Mart stock instead, he knew he wasn't like the other kids... His addiction to personal finance has paid off for his family and now he's helping you to afford the life that you want. Check him out on the web at Google Plus, Twitter and Facebook.

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