Are You Losing the Retirement Gamble? Live Chat

For most Americans, traditional retirement is now a pipe dream. Six in 10 believe they’ll have to delay retirement. Yet, the financial services industry is making billions of dollars a year managing the funds we still have.

What’s going on? And who’s to blame?

In The Retirement Gamble, FRONTLINE correspondent Martin Smith investigates what happened to retirement in America and the role that financial services companies may be playing in draining your savings, year after year.

Through interviews with Wall Street executives at the helm of the mutual fund industry and former financial advisers who may or may not have their clients’ best interests at heart, Smith traces the remarkable rise of the 401(k)—a product Americans buy without knowing its true cost.

How much, exactly, are Americans paying in fees for their 401(k) accounts — and what are they getting in return? What happened to retirement in America — where did pensions go? And what are some of the biggest misconceptions consumers have about retirement?  What do we need to know?

We’ve asked Martin Smith and producer Marcela Gaviria to join us to take these questions — and answer yours.

We’ll also be joined by leading 401(k) expert Robert Hiltonsmith, a policy analyst at Demos who is interviewed in the film. Our guest questioner is Penny Wang, a writer and editor at Money, where she writes a monthly mutual fund column, Fund Watch.

Next Avenue senior editor Richard Eisenberg will also be dropping by to ask questions and offer commentary.

We’d like to thank Money and Next Avenue for partnering with us on this chat.

You can leave a question in the chat window below, and come by at 2 p.m. ET on Wed., April 24 to join the live discussion.