By Emily Spreiser
The Pension Rights Center’s legal program responds to hundreds of inquiries from individuals who need an attorney’s help understanding or obtaining an earned retirement benefit. In fact, in 2018 we received almost two thousand help requests from individuals online or over the phone. And our public education materials provide helpful information to many more individuals who need help understanding their legal rights when it comes to retirement benefits.
But we’re legal experts, not financial experts or investment advisors, so when people ask us about how to invest for retirement and what financial choices to make, we refer them to organizations that specialize in investor education.
The Investor Protection Trust (IPT) and related Investor Protection Institute (IPI) offer a variety of excellent, unbiased investor education materials. These materials are designed to help everyday people prepare financially for life after work.
I recommend going to the IPT and IPI websites and looking around at all the materials they have available, but I’d like to draw particular attention to IPI’s When I’m 65 publication series. This series focuses on helping Americans invest wisely for retirement at every stage of the retirement process, from just getting started saving early in your career to making your retirement savings last when you’re already retired. This series is great because it makes complicated – even scary – concepts feel a lot less daunting. And we really like these materials because the organizations that sponsor them are not self-interested; They don’t represent any particular industry that might benefit from getting you to invest in a certain way.
IPT and IPI are great resources and anyone with questions about saving for (or in) retirement should check them out.