WASHINGTON – If you work for a business that offers no retirement benefits, Jacob Lew has a deal for you.
The U.S. Treasury secretary spent part of his day Friday trying to drum up business for the Obama administration's new myRA program.
MyRA is one of the ways the White House hopes to address a $4.13 trillion shortfall in retirement savings that stands to leave millions of U.S. senior citizens penniless in the coming decades. MyRA lets workers without workplace retirement plans save money.
Launched late in 2015, myRA allows Americans under 50 to contribute up to $5,500 a year to a retirement fund invested in government-guaranteed U.S. Treasury bonds. People 50 and over can kick in up to $6,500 a year. The savings program maxes out at $15,000 per person when savers will ideally roll their savings into private individual retirement accounts, known as IRAs.
"MyRA is something we have designed to try and help people get started [saving] earlier when they think they don't have options to save," Lew told reporters.
He acknowledged that a single program cannot fix the nation's retirement funding crisis. That, he said, will require multiple strategies, including legislation, and will likely take a generation to resolve. Still, as tax season approaches and people for the first time will be able to have the IRS designate portions of their refunds to myRA, the secretary wanted to get in his pitch for behavior modification.
In its first three months, Lew said, the program has attracted 10,000 people.
That is a minuscule number compared to what experts say will be needed.