Savings: 5 signs Americans are forgetting the lessons of 2008

Declining savings is one of five signs that American households are forgetting the lessons of the Great Recession:

4. Retirement savings options are harder to come by

Max Whittaker/Reuters/File
Calpers, whose headquarters is seen here in Sacramento, Calif., manages retirement benefits for more than 1.6 million people. But only a third of families have a retirement account offered through their work, according to a 2010 survey.

The Survey of Consumer Finances reports that in 2010, just 35 percent of families held some sort of retirement account offered through a current or past job, down 2.9 percentage points from 2007. With fewer employer-sponsored plans, consumers are left to navigate the process of researching and managing a retirement plan on their own – something they may not be fully equipped to handle.

To further strain retirement savings, a study by HelloWallet indicates that 1 in 4 US households with a retirement plan have used at least some of these savings for nonretirement needs. The fees and penalties associated with such withdrawals usually make this habit costly.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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