It's probably too complex of a product for much of its audience. The whole retirement process is usually presented with little useful guidance. Here's a packe

It's probably too complex of a product for much of its audience. The whole retirement process is usually presented with little useful guidance. Here's a packet of different investment offerings, many of which are opaque, and plenty are surprisingly inefficient (high fees, excessive turnover). How much should I be contributing? Here's a calculator with confusing and iffy assumptions baked right in! This all but guarantees the house will win in some way-- even if you get a "good" outcome, you're probably not doing absolute optimally and that margin bankrolls it. Actually, I'd like to pull out a little. Investment in general is too complex for most people. My 401(k) using the default "2035 target date" plan I was offered is down 20% over the last year, but it's not like my self-directed investments are doing better. The only thing that's worked out bulletproof has been I-bonds, and I'm afraid I'm not going to get that far on that, with a 10k-per-annum cap. TBH, what I want is a product where I can "prepay" retirement services and have someone else take the economic risks. In a way, defined benefit pensions were sort of like that, but I'd like to be even further decoupled from the dollar. Let me sign up to pay $x,000 per year during my working years, and when I'm 70, I get a paid-for-life furnished condo in (what will by then be) the palm-tree lined beachfront party town of Halifax, Nova Scotia. If the counterparty to the deal is a brilliant dollar jockey and makes 70% a year compounded on my money, good for him and I don't see a cent of it. But if he bets it all on Meta and has to pick up dog droppings to pay for ramen, too bad, he's the one who's gotta pull a housing unit out of his ass in 2050. Put it behind some sort of state backing fund to ensure delivery of goods if you have to. I also suspect the default 401(k) choices tend to reinforce our society's toxic relationship with the stock market. Yeah, there's probably something bond-centric or emerging-market somewhere in the Poorly Printed Menu of Confusing Investment Choices, but mostly, it leads to the narrative of "We have to keep pumping up the S&P 500, and make a bunch of flailing companies trade at a P/E of 73, because Grandpa's portfolio is fundamentally garbage but we feel a social duty to not make him work at McDonald's when he's 89."