88 • MARTIN H. RUBY
daily. After all, the frozen yogurt is so flavorful, so delicious . . . and it’s fat-free! There’s no guilt in eating it. A few weeks later, Jerry and Elaine are perplexed. None of their clothes fit. They’ve put on seven or eight pounds. They can’t figure out what happened. Until they remember the fat-free frozen yogurt. No, says Kramer. It can’t be the yogurt. The yogurt is fat-free. It’s good for you. As we all know, it was the yogurt. Because fat-free doesn’t mean calorie-free, nor does it mean sugar-free. So why does this remind me of saving for retirement? 401(k)s and IRAs are the fat-free frozen yogurt of the savings industry. They have become the most popular way to save for re- tirement. People plow savings into them every day. And they feel good about it, because their money is growing tax-deferred. It’s fat-free. It has benefits. Of course, savers are overlooking the other features that matter when saving — the calories and sugar content, if you will. Is defer- ring your taxes helpful? What restrictions come with 401(k)s? Much as it took weeks for Jerry and Elaine to discover the un- savory downside of yogurt (weight gain), most people don’t realize the downside of their 401(k) or IRAs until later in life, when they retire and begin to understand the true repercussions of tax-de- ferred saving. I want to steer you away from that fat-free frozen yogurt binge. Just because it’s what you’ve been eating in the past doesn’t mean you’re helpless to change what happens in the future. That’s why I wrote this book.
What the Future Holds Right now, whether you’re forty, fifty, sixty, or seventy, you have a choice. With today’s life expectancies, many Americans live
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