Let’s All Innovate Together!

There has been a lot of important and impactful innovation in the area of retirement savings over the last few years, especially in multiple employer plans, state-sponsored retirement plans, and the increased use of automatic enrollment. These innovations are helping us start to address the retirement savings gap in this country, but gains in just the retirement space aren’t enough if we really want to improve people’s overall financial wellbeing. Saving more for your future retirement doesn’t really help, for example, if that leads you to increase high-interest credit card debt in the short-term just to meet your basic needs. 

We need to think about helping people holistically. Let’s not just get more people to save for retirement. That’s just one piece of the puzzle. Let’s simultaneously help folks get their first bank account, pay down their credit card debt, secure affordable housing, manage student debt, find affordable health care, land higher paying jobs, diversify revenue sources, access cheap, healthy food, pay for transportation needs, and get affordable child care. 

In policy circles, we tend to focus on our areas of interest and expertise. We innovate in our specialized space or help people with one specific need and then send them on their way. That’s not enough. We need to lift up our heads out of our silos and figure out how to work collaboratively and innovate across policy areas and systems. You can save a lot more for retirement if you can meet your other basic financial needs at the same time.

In the world of personal finance, the most collaboration I’ve seen is in financial literacy. While helping start up the OregonSaves retirement program, I worked with banks, credit unions, non-profits, financial advisors, and social safety net agencies on ways to work together to better help Oregonians with all their financial needs. There are so many folks out there in both the public service, the nonprofit world, and private enterprise innovating and doing great work. The minimum we can do is to help people better navigate the existing network of programs, products, and services. 

Just telling folks about other places to go for help or teaching them about personal finance isn’t enough, though. Behavioral economics has taught us the value of designing systems around default human behavior. We need to figure out how to actually connect those services and create a seamless system of support for folks, to help them with all of their current and future needs, so that they can in turn maximize their own potential.

So come join me, and let’s all innovate together!

More to come! / Joel

Columnist and Senior Associate Joel Metlen is based in Oregon. Joel is a pioneer of the state facilitated retirement savings space, woven into a career of public service and innovation. At OregonSaves, Joel’s responsibilities ranged from marketing and employer engagement to operations and data analysis. You’ll see his insights from that experience, and more, here.

This piece was featured in the September 9, 2021 edition of Retirement Security Matters. For more fresh thinking on retirement savings innovation, check out the newsletter here.