Disneysteve said:
"This assumes that the 401k is their only retirement account and they have no other assets. For a great many workers, this isn't true. People may also have an IRA/Roth. They may have rolled over a 401k from a previous job into an IRA. They may have taxable investment accounts. They may be married and have spouses who allocate their own accounts differently to balance out the joint assets.
Also, a worker's 401k may not represent a big portion of marital retirement assets. My wife allocates 100% of her 401k to stocks, but her 401k balance represents less than 5% of our retirement assets so that isn't an issue."
All of the above is true in our case. I keep having to explain to financial service reps that we have 'those bases' covered in other retirement savings, and maybe they aren't held with them at their institution, but please don't keep confusing yourself w/your crafted scenario w/o considering that we do have other retirement assets.
Hubster and I - long married - in a May/December marriage, keep our TOTAL accounts allocated for a mid-range scenario at this time, across the wide spectrum, instead of each of us allocating for our individual actuarial (sp?) time-frames. Could this bite me in the butte as I'm the younger? Maybe, but I'm the one who also has a longer conceivable time frame for future earning potentials. We're a team - what's his is mine, what's mine is his. It's all ours.
As DisneySteve pointed out I don't think we've a long enough time span w/people actually investing for their own retirement in these relatively new products to gain a wide perspective of how well we're doing as a nation of retirement savers, and just taking 401-K's as the basis NOW is going to end up w/a false picture.
|