I’m going to start this post with a quote:
“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big, I mean – except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.” ~J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Chapter 22, spoken by the character Holden Caulfield
What Holden expresses above in many ways mirrors how I feel about the financial state of American families. I attended a retirement income conference this week and listened to many experts present their perspective on the retirement challenge for the baby-boom generation. Top on the agenda was educating investors through work place efforts in conjunction with defined contribution programs. As I listened to discussions about what the Department of Labor would do about mandating retirement income as a qualified default investment alternative (QDIA) and helping households gain more financial literacy, I just couldn’t stop thinking about all those messages that financial service companies send to consumers and just how confusing it is to figure out how to manage our budgets and our investments.
More thoughts this weekend on this.
