piggy bankWe Seinfeld fans certainly remember the classic episode in which Kramer, fed up with a seemingly never ending stream of catalogues deposited in his mail box, takes his complaint to the Post Office. That comes to mind because although it’s sometimes easy to miss among a veritable tsunami of junk brochures, menus, advertisements and the like delivered daily in our mail, the periodical we always read is the monthly AARP Bulletin, and if you’re over 50, you probably get one as well. In the April edition, for example, there’s much of interest to seniors in a “Guide to Financial Resilience,” including interesting features on achieving retirement goals, getting the right investment advice, asking smart questions of advisors and “the care and feeding of your 401(k).” There’s also an exclusive interview with President Barack Obama, and here is his response to the question of what he thinks retirement security should look like: “Social Security is still going to be a key pillar of it. But beyond Social Security, we’re going to have to do more to encourage people to save effectively. Some rules that we’ve already passed would, for example, encourage employers to auto-enroll their employees. It turns out that it makes a big difference when you first start a job if the employer says, ‘we’re automatically enrolling you in a savings plan unless you opt out’, or they say, ‘do you want to opt in’? A lot of people don’t opt in, but if they’re automatically enrolled, they’re more likely to stick with it.”