The Boulevard to Financial Independence

By Matt

So we tried an experiment to see how willing people were to join a Meetup of others who wanted to get on track for retirement. The first week after we announced our Meetup, there were about 40 people signed up. Great, we thought.

So then we found an excellent speaker to cover the basics of retirement planning for those of us who were relatively uninitiated, which, according to these statistics there are plenty of in the US:

1. One out of three Americans could not answer this question correctly: Suppose you had $100 in a savings account and the interest rate was 2% per year. After 5 years, how much do you think you would have in the account if you left the money to grow: more than $102, exactly $102, less than $102?
2. One out of two could not answer this question correctly (and it’s true or false!): “Buying a single company stock usually provides a safer return than a stock mutual fund.”

* Annamaria Lusardi and Olivia S. Mitchell. Financial Literacy and Planning: Implications for Retirement Wellbeing. University of Michigan Retirement Research Center, 2005.

So we stacked the deck for the first meeting and invited our friends and spouses. There were three people who came that were unknown to us. The feedback was positive, but there was very little attendance at following events (one of which the featured speaker canceled, since there weren’t enough people who RSVP’d) and the people who were most interested in the Meetup were actually in the financial services industry and seemed to be prospecting for clients.

So here’s my conclusion:

People want to at least do something (like sign up for a Meetup) so that they feel like they’re being proactive toward planning for retirement, however, they don’t want to publicly admit to themselves (and total strangers) that they haven’t prepared properly.

Lee Eisenberg’s book “The Number” claims that retirement and how much you’ve saved toward retiring is the last big taboo. There was recently an article in the NY Times on this subject: that it’s easier for Americans to talk about the fact that they’re on anti-depressants than is it for them to talk to others about money problems. So for now, we’re going to discontinue the Meetup. Who knows, maybe in 10 years or so, Americans might have finally worked through this last taboo and we’ll be packing ‘em in at the retirement planning Meetup.

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