The Problem with Retirement Savings Plans

Podcast:

#386: The Problem with Retirement Savings Plans

In this video:

00:27 – Kiwisaver and the hidden costs

02:20 – Why would you invest in this?

03:28 – Retirement and the Forex market

05:15 – You need to understand the FX market before trading funds

05:58 – A week of retirement related emails this week

06:16 – Webinars for traders, both new and experienced

Why do people pay massive fees to money managers, only for the money managers to lose their funds? Let's talk about that and more right now.

Hey, traders, Andrew Mitchem here at the Forex Trading Coach with video and podcast number 386.

Kiwisaver and the hidden costs

Now I've just heard on the news today about here in New Zealand, the KiwiSaver. So KiwiSaver's a bit like a retirement fund that people contribute and employers contribute into in the States, they call it a 401k. So it's basically a national kind of retirement fund where you choose the company that you want to invest with. And anyway, so results here. This is coming today, Friday, the 2nd of October, and this is saying that KiwiSaver members here in New Zealand, and bear in mind, we're a very small country of under 5 million people, total people. KiwiSaver members paid $538.9 million to the managers handling their money over the year to March.

So here we are in October, this report's only up until March 2020. But they lost a combined $820.9 million in the first quarter, up until the end of the first quarter of this year. And of course they're blaming it on the stock market plummeting and the United States market recorded its fastest 30% drop on record. They're going... Talking about that and they're basically blaming COVID, but this was up until the end of March. Now COVID didn't really hardly take effect until then. It may have for the first month or few weeks, but imagine what it's going to be for April to March 2020 into 2021, the year that we're currently in right now. So they lost 800 and almost $821 million combined, but they charged their members nearly 540 million in management fees.

Why would you invest in this?

And that just got me thinking, it's like, well, that is just ludicrous. Why are people doing things like that?

You know, I realise that the traditional ways of investing or putting your money into term deposits and into banks and things like that, and obviously with interest rates being so low around the world, things like this KiwiSaver, where they encourage all basically people in employment to go and do. And encourage young people to go and do it. And now, in some ways it has some merit, I suppose, because it gets people thinking about what they should do with their funds and retirement, et cetera, like that where I'm just wasting it all, especially for younger people. So I'm not knocking the idea, but the reality is, is these people are losing money and paying a fortune in fees for the privilege of getting nowhere. And like I said, this is only up until the end of March 2020. So you can't blame coronavirus and you can't blame plummeting stock markets and things like that because that's all going to come in this year.

So what's this figure going to be like this time next year?

Retirement and the Forex market

So it got me thinking, well, I've talked about retirement before. This week, when you get to watch this video, I'm going to be sending out a series of emails regarding how I look at the Forex market and how I believe that you can use that correctly with low risk to aid you with retirement. So it doesn't matter whether you're 20 years old and retirement's just this distant thing, because when we're all 20 years old, no one really cares about retirement. You know, you just think it's this... For old people. You're not interested. I mean, I thought exactly the same. Just don't really care about stuff like that. I'm worried about what I'm doing at 20 years old.