Pod Insights The Clark Howard Podcast 06.10.26 Automatic Retirement Accounts / Inflation Calculation About this episode Clark’s teaching mission has always focused on getting you to save every dollar you can for retirement, especially when you can “set it and forget it” through automatic contributions. It’s the best way to achieve financial freedom. Smart new initiatives are helping Americans save more: Automatic Retirement Savings Programs. Meanwhile, if you feel like your paycheck isn't going as far as it used to, you’re right. Comparing what everyday items cost 30 years ago versus today, the math explains why so many hardworking Americans feel completely squeezed. Critical pillars of the American dream have skyrocketed. Check out the link below to calculate your own inflation reality and see how to make your dollars work harder for you. Inflation Calculator - Clark.com Plus, Christa shares your #AskClark questions and Clark gives his take. All this and more on the June 10, 2026, episode of The Clark Howard Show. Submit your questions: Ask Clark Automatic Retirement Savings: Segment 1 Ask Clark: Segment 2 Calculating Inflation: Segment 3 Ask Clark: Segment 4 Mentioned on the show: [The Washington Post] A better way to make saving money easier What Is a 403(b) and How Does It Work? - Clark Howard How I Set My Teens Up for Retirement in 5 Minutes Here's What 26 Everyday Things Cost In The 1990s Vs. 2026 Inflation Calculator - Clark.com Dacia Cars - Good Thinking - Dacia Chase - Payment Choices Matter Clark.com resources: Episode transcripts Community. Clark.com / Ask Clark Clark.com daily money newsletter Consumer Action Center Free Helpline: 636-492-5275 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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1:20 Speaker 02 It's great to have you here on the Clark Howard Show. You know, our mission is to serve you with advice and information that empowers you so you make better financial decisions in your life. One thing I've always focused on is getting you to save every dollar you can for retirement. What great news there is on that front today, especially when you can set it and forget it. How? Through automatic contributions. Behavioral economics says that's the only way to make it happen. And I'm going to begin today's show talking about some new initiatives to get you and me saving
2:04 Speaker 02 more. Also, are things really as crazy more expensive than we think? I got some numbers for you that go in the Wayback Machine, and it's something, something terrible how expensive some things have become, and something we don't really notice how cheap others are compared to what they used to be. That's coming later. So, a lot of fuss recently about new data from one of the largest 401k providers in the United States, Fidelity Investments,
2:45 Speaker 02 that said that the average person enrolled in a 401k that Fidelity manages is now saving, you ready, 9.8 cents of every dollar they make, they're saving in their employer-provided 401k. Now, what excited me about that is, you may know that I've said forever, for the last 40 years, I've said, "Save a dime of every dollar you make. Take that dollar out of your life. When you make that dollar, 90 cents you live on, a dime of it is saved." Period. And this
3:27 Speaker 02 is the first time ever we've been in shouting distance of that, at that 9.8 cents. And that's the good news. And then the better news is employers provide a match on top of that at most places. And so, the effective average amount that people are putting aside, adding in the employer match when they have that 401k, is just under 15%. I mean, that's great, right? To a point, because half of people workplaces, there's no 401k provided. Our current alphabet soup of ways to save money.
4:08 Speaker 02 Is too complicated, too confusing. I mean, why is it you can put three times the amount of money in a 401k what you're allowed to put in an IRA? Why does that make sense? It doesn't, right? But the bigger problem isn't that. It's that when people don't have access to a retirement plan where they work, the amount that people save is puny. Puny is an old expression, meaning you can't even see what they're saving. There's so little there. However, an experiment that has spread among the states, and my daughter Steffi lives
4:50 Speaker 02 in California, experiences this, is she is at jobs that don't have retirement plans, is automatically enrolled in an IRA, and they take money right from her check and put it into an IRA. Kind of like we do with anybody who comes to work for one of my companies where they're automatically enrolled in our 401k plan. Automatically, we take, if it's 6% or 7% of their pay, and it goes right in there, and then we match it dollar for dollar up to 6%. And this is all about behavioral economics I mentioned earlier, that you want to create creatures of habit.
5:34 Speaker 02 And people, once automatically enrolled, almost always do things they wouldn't have done otherwise because they're new at a job, automatically enrolled in it. It's the check they're used to with that money already subtracted, but it becomes great addition for financial security in their lives. You may remember that for just being a municipal vote, it got a lot of publicity, that the city of Philadelphia had a citizen vote, and they voted to have automatic enrollment for people in jobs there. It's helping over 200,000 people who hadn't been saving anything save money for retirement.
6:18 Speaker 02 And then you look at people who 401ks have been around long enough that people in everyday jobs, the numbers that have become millionaires, just from what has gone in over the years into a 401k at work. Now, if I were your emperor, what I would do is I would get rid of all the alphabet soup and confusing stuff with all these various retirement plans we have. And there'd be one retirement plan you have that would be yours, that would be portable, that would follow you from employer to employer. If the employer participates, they put money
6:58 Speaker 02 in it. If they don't, they don't. It should be much simpler than it is. Unfortunately, there's been no political will to clean up this haphazard way of saving money. So it requires, because many of us who work somewhere don't have access to a plan, we're not in a state or municipality that requires automatic enrollment, any kind of IRA, it's up to you and me. We're the ones who have to do it. And so you have to overcome life's inertia, where it never happens, and you're the one who's got to make it happen and set up an
7:37 Speaker 02 account and contribute to it automatically. Automatic is everything. Because if it's not automatic, we just don't get it done. And I remember, there was a time in my life, when the only access to a retirement plan I had was an IRA, and there was no automatic enrollment at that point. And in my mind, I was going to contribute every month, you know, just put that money in. And life happens, and I realized I wasn't doing it. It wasn't happening. And that's why setting your savings for retirement on automatic pilot is core and key
8:20 Speaker 02 to reducing anxiety in your life and creating financial security over your long lifetime.
8:28 Speaker 03 All right. Well, Carol in New York sent in a question about her retirement account. She says, my 403B plan matches 5%, but recently they made a change and they give you the full match in January of the following year. That makes employees miss out on dollar cost averaging throughout the year. Is participating in the plan still worth it?
8:49 Speaker 02 Yeah. I mean, if you're getting a 5% match, you want to grab that 5% match. Beyond that, participating in your employer's 403B often is not a good idea beyond a match because of the embedded costs in the 403B tend to be 10 to 20 times higher than in a typical 401K. And if your 403B is with an insurance company, the odds are you're paying very high commissions and very high fees. But even with that being the case, you'd still want to put in five and get the match for five.
9:32 Speaker 02 The reason more and more places are going to this where you get your match in January for the prior year is that way people who leave during that year miss out entirely on the match. It's a way of saving the employer money. And that's why they've gone to that change. It's not about dollar cost averaging.
9:54 Speaker 03 Now, what is that website again where you can put in your 403B?
9:58 Speaker 02 403Byes.org.
10:00 Speaker 03 403Byes.org. Because there are, yeah, because there are some great ones. People always write in and say, hey, you know, there are some really good low cost.
10:07 Speaker 02 What I'm trying to do is hit people over the head with a baseball bat. Figuratively, not literally. And make sure you're aware, especially for teachers, most school districts and most union-provided plans for 403Bs are absolute horrific junk with gigantic fees and commissions involved in them. Teachers don't know, and they can often end up with less money at the end of the year than they started with because of the monstrous fees and commissions. And that's why you need to know that you need those disclosures that the insurance
10:48 Speaker 02 companies try to hide from you like you can't imagine on what the fees are you're paying.
10:54 Speaker 03 Rona in Florida says, "I recently adjusted my 401K contributions, and I'm now putting all my contributions 15% into the Roth option."
11:02 Speaker 02 Yay!
11:03 Speaker 03 "I was surprised to see," and then I researched and learned, "that now employer-matching contributions can also go into the Roth 401K. Is there any downside to having the employer match going into the Roth option? I do have a couple of years of contributions in the regular 401K."
11:19 Speaker 02 So, the disadvantage of having the employer money go in Roth is you're going to pay tax on money you don't actually see that's going to go into that plan. If you do pre-tax employer match, then the tax on that portion is deferred till after you retire. So, it's really an issue what kind of money you make. If you're making a lot of money at your job, if you're single, well, we talked about that recently, $600,000, I think, for a married couple, and it was $400,000 for an individual, I think, you're better off below those numbers, which is most everybody, you're better off
12:04 Speaker 02 doing Roth, Roth, Roth, Roth, including paying the tax on that employer match being Roth.
12:11 Speaker 02 And there are rare circumstances that people have brought up that are exceptions to that rule. One, if you're in an income-based repayment on student loans, you might want the advantage of the traditional that would put you in a lower repayment rate on your student loans. Trying to think what other exceptions there were. There aren't a lot. So, the Roth version is much better, but you know, someone who has some money in traditional of various types and Roth gives you a lot more financial planning you can do in retirement.
12:52 Speaker 02 But the emphasis should be on having money Roth-oriented unless you're a very high-income earner.
13:00 Speaker 03 Sandy in Georgia says, "At least a couple of times a week, my sentences start with, Clark Howard says, 'My daughter is 16 and will have her first summer job.'"
13:09 Speaker 02 Did she roll her eyes every time you do that?
13:12 Speaker 03 Probably. "I have looked into the Fidelity Teen account, but I have questions. At 16, the reality is that saving for retirement will not be her focus. Her focus will be geared towards saving for a car and saving for college spending money. With this short-term horizon, can you explain how the Fidelity Teen account would be a good choice for her? Or is it a better idea to get her a credit union account instead? If so, what should we look for in choosing a credit union? We do have a small Charles Schwab account with about $4,000 where we invest for her in order for her to understand investing."
13:47 Speaker 02 I love that you're doing that. It would be natural for you to continue to have the money at Schwab. The advantage of having the money at Schwab or the alternative of the Fidelity Teen account is that you're going to have options across the full array. Now, it's her first summer job. I'd want her to put some money. In her first Roth IRA as a teen, it's going to keep it from affecting her ability if she goes to college to qualify for financial aid. And being 16, she gets essentially one more doubling of her money over her working lifetime for whatever she puts in there. The other money can
14:30 Speaker 02 go into a money market fund there that will be earning generally at or above, usually above, what she can earn with a credit union and their savings account, with an online bank and their savings accounts. So there's no reason that what you're talking about can't be accomplished at Schwab or at Fidelity. I prefer them for money that's being put aside for the future. It's just because the design from the ground up of Schwab, Fidelity, and Vanguard is all
15:08 Speaker 02 about providing low-cost products across savings and investments. You can, even with Schwab or Fidelity, you can use their service that will place broker-placed CDs, which pay a higher rate than you can get on your own normally with a credit union or a bank on CDs that you would purchase. So I still think that what you already have going at Schwab, or what you might do with Fidelity, would be superior to doing something else with your 16-year-old's money. And please, at least have some of that money from the summer job go into a Roth IRA, creating the
15:53 Speaker 02 concept from teenage years of saving for the long-term future in addition to shorter-term desires and needs. Coming up ahead, speaking of needs, what things cost? We've had terrible inflation cycles. We're in our second really bad cycle since 2019. And this one may be worse than what we had before. But what's the overall cost picture looking back over time? I want to address that.
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18:50 Speaker 02 Inflation has been accelerating and it's not good. Cause what happens is people develop what's called an inflationary psychology. Companies think, oh, wow, we can push up prices because people expect prices to go up. People might want more money from an employer to deal with the expected higher costs of the ones they've already had. And so it kind of feeds on itself once it gets going. And a lot of things have gone crazy up in price since 2019. And I read the most distressing story about the automakers figured out through the COVID shortages
19:35 Speaker 02 that they would rather limit the supply of new vehicles they're selling to create a market where they can sell them at a much higher price than before. You know, it was very common. Before COVID, that a new car would be around $30,000. Today, the average price of a new car, not that many years later, seven years later, is right around 50 grand. And that's because of the mix of vehicles that automakers are making. It's not that the cost of all the materials and stuff going into vehicles has gone up at anything like that kind of rate of increase.
20:20 Speaker 02 It's the choice the manufacturers are making and the protections first put in place during the Biden administration continued in the Trump administration that have blocked the United States market from affordable vehicles that are available almost everywhere else in the world, except here. I think I mentioned recently how there are all these vehicles showing up in Texas that people are buying in Mexico, where they're buying new vehicles for $10,000 to $20,000, and bring them across the border. And now there's a movement by car dealers to ban them from our roads. I mean, come on.
21:05 Speaker 02 The reality is, let's have some more affordable products. Enough about that for a second. So let's go back 30-year cycle. This was put together in a BuzzFeed item. A gallon of milk down, well, believe it or not, when you inflation adjust, a gallon of milk is down 24%. Eggs, up 31%. Loaf of bread, up 12%. Now, what this means when you inflation adjust, it means it's taking you, when you take your purchasing power, what it was 30 years ago versus now, these items are all taking more of your paycheck when you put them into an inflation-adjusted kind of thing.
21:47 Speaker 02 So you recognize the inflation there's been versus what people are making, and they're still up. Ground beef, 132% higher than 30 years ago. Bacon, 66% higher. Coffee, 14% higher. We're in an up cycle right now in coffee. The Big Mac index, ever heard of that? The Big Mac is up 15%. Gasoline, up 51%.
22:16 Speaker 02 Diesel up 76%. Electricity, this is the stunner. Electricity is cheaper today than it was 30 years ago. And average new car up 29%, meaning that it's 29% more hours worked equivalent for you to buy a new vehicle. Housing, 67% higher. I mean, and then by comparison, and this fits something I talked about just last week. Rent, 36% higher.
22:55 Speaker 02 So buying a house up 67%, renting an apartment up 36%. Mortgage rates, actually a lot lower than they were 30 years ago, even at the rates that now are higher than they were for the last decade when they were artificially being manipulated. College costs up 80%. 80%. I mean, that's serious. Healthcare, employer, health insurance up 114%. Wow. Federal minimum wage, down 29%.
23:35 Speaker 02 Household income, up 3% over 30 years. You get the idea. Why are Americans upset right now? Because if it feels like their dollars aren't going as far, the feels like is actually true in so many categories. Now, I said when I was talking about this at the top of this podcast, there are things that are much cheaper or didn't even exist. I mean, think about televisions. Most electronics are a steal of a deal compared to what they used to be. It's amazing what technology has done to drive down prices in so many things.
24:19 Speaker 02 But then so many things we have to have are so much higher. How about something we want to have? Pay television? Up 209%. 209%. Yeah. Crazy, right? Disneyland? 219%. Now, remember, this is inflation adjusted. It's up 219%. So we got a lot we're dealing with. And people who are in the bottom half of income earners in the country have been absolutely, totally squeezed. It is a very rough time.
25:01 Speaker 02 The people who own things are doing great. The people who own their own home, who maybe own investment property, who own investments, like we were just talking about with 401Ks, money in those and IRAs, who might have stock in something, may have their own investment account. People who have those things have benefited mightily. People who have to buy things, take that paycheck and use them to buy things. There's a reason it feels like things have become more expensive because overall, they have.
25:47 Speaker 03 Speaking of that, and cars you mentioned, you mentioned buying from Mexico. Thomas in Florida sent this one in. I heard about a carmaker in Europe. I think the name is, is it Dacia? Dacia? That is producing a more economical car that sells for much less than the other manufacturers. One, have you heard of them? And if yes, what do you know about them? And two, what do you think? And is there a possibility that we could see something like that in the price gouging USA? And just Dacia is spelled D-A-C-I-A.
26:20 Speaker 02 Yeah, and they were, when you were recently in Europe, they were all over the place.
26:25 Speaker 03 Oh. I didn't even.
26:27 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, I mean, I look at cars, so they're all over. And Dacia is something that we actually covered on the podcast, I think sometime last year.
26:36 Speaker 03 I do kind of remember that now, yeah.
26:38 Speaker 02 And it's because what they do is they take current technology. They don't build state of the art things. They use things that have been known to work, that the research and development costs have already been absorbed. And they make just reliable, simple transportation of all different sized vehicles. And.
26:57 Speaker 03 Like roll up windows kind of thing?
26:59 Speaker 02 No, no, they have power windows.
27:01 Speaker 03 Okay, just wondering.
27:02 Speaker 02 Everybody does power windows now, pretty much. So the Dacia story, I'm just going to give the quick version now, since I did cover it. I think it was last year or two years ago. What they, what they did was they were offering them only in lower income Eastern European countries. And people in Western Europe are like, wait a minute. I can go over there and for nine thousand euro, I can buy a brand new vehicle. But where I am is going to cost me a minimum 25,000 euro for a vehicle. So people kept flying over on Ryanair, Whiz Air, or EasyJet. They were taking one way flights over to Eastern Europe.
27:45 Speaker 02 It was in the EU, so they could do it. And they were buying these vehicles and they were driving them back to Western Europe. And the Dacia people were like, okay. So now they're sold all over Europe. And going full circle here, the only reasons we don't have a Dacia type kind of thing in the United States is US automakers have chosen they don't want to do it. They don't want to offer lower priced vehicles. And second, the import taxes we put in place, the tariffs, to prevent the affordable vehicles that everybody else all over the world right now is getting from South Korea, from China, from various other manufacturing places of origin like Eastern Europe.
28:32 Speaker 02 And they are essentially banned from the United States to protect the US automakers.
28:40 Speaker 03 William in Georgia says, I zelled a payment to the wrong number and the wrong name of the person I was trying to zell. The wrong person just happened to have Zelle and the payment went into a Wells Fargo bank account. I've contacted Zelle and they told me to contact my bank. I've contacted my bank and they filed a dispute on my behalf, but I've not gotten a response. What can I do to recover my money?
29:04 Speaker 02 William, this is one of the real problems with this big bad Zelle is that, and it's like that warning I read recently on the podcast from Chase, that it's like you just sent a pile of cash somewhere and it's a one-way trip only. There are no consumer protections whatsoever with Zelle, which I want to give Chase credit. They laid out in plain, simple English, "You're playing with fire when you use Zelle." Those are my words, not theirs.
29:44 Speaker 02 And William, I am really sorry. It is essentially impossible to recover that money once you have made that error. And if you use Zelle, big bad Zelle, use Venmo or Cash App, you have to be certain of the proper address you're sending it to. The problem that makes Zelle so much worse is that Zelle is embedded in your checking account. That makes it far more dangerous to you than Venmo or Cash App and the underlying way they operate.
30:22 Speaker 02 And the banks promised Congress that they were going to institute consumer protections and lied.
30:32 Speaker 03 Rachel in Illinois says, "As a middle-aged special education teacher and mother caught up in a monotonous cycle of life, I found myself staring at a large amount of debt upon divorce from my husband, whom I mistakenly trusted with the sole review of our finances and a few other things, but that's not so much the point. Being raised in a household where gender roles were stressed and finances not being a priority for teaching women, this may not be surprising, but alas, it was my circumstance at the time. Since then, I've had the pleasure of dating a man who introduced me to you and we jointly watched your show several times. I couldn't even tell you how many times he referenced you. I'm glad to
31:13 Speaker 03 say that now I am nearly debt-free and dropped over $20,000 in debt in approximately one year."
31:19 Speaker 02 Congratulations to you.
31:21 Speaker 03 This would not have happened if you did not advocate so well for financial literacy, so that an amazing man could share your words of wisdom with me. I've also been grateful that the financial literacy may be a more important topic for students in the future, and I hope that stays the course. So, to end with, thank you for existing and conducting conversations concerning cash competency." I love that.
31:43 Speaker 02 Well, I mean, Rachel, first of all, getting back on your feet emotionally with this amazing man, and financially, doing the hard work and knowing how to do it, gosh, this is inspiration you're giving to other people going, it can be men or women, going through a divorce circumstance, finding their finances crushed by that, and being able to rebuild a life emotionally and financially. You know, when you're going through a really hard time in life, and you feel like you don't see your way out, feel like you're in
32:25 Speaker 02 the bottom of a well, and no way to climb out, and so often, it's there. There is a way out. Finding it is what's so core and key. You did, and congratulations to you, and I want to wish you Great future success, and thank you for sharing your inspiration with others.
32:49 Speaker 03 Totally. I also want to just add one quick thing because the whole gender roles thing and all that, even if you've been married 30 years, I think we've been stressing recently the importance of both spouses knowing how to access accounts, how all the money is working, and assigning it to one person now is really not a good idea because God forbid, something could happen to you. You know, you never know, someone could become temporarily or long-term incapacitated, and the spouse is really left in a lurch. And so it's a really good idea to communicate, no matter what.
33:23 Speaker 02 Ignorance with money is not bliss.
33:25 Speaker 03 It's not bliss at all, no. We've seen it too many times.
33:28 Speaker 02 Right. So with that having been said, and I want to say something else. I was thinking, as we were talking about Rachel, with William, with the Zelle thing, I didn't express enough to you how sorry I am about the loss of your money. My anger with the way Zelle operates kind of overtook me there, and I didn't express my sympathy to you about the loss of your money, as I should have. And if somehow money shows back up, I will tell you, you would be more likely to win one of those billion-dollar lottery jackpots. But if it did, unbelievable,
34:10 Speaker 02 and I'd love to hear that. But the truth is, going back to Zelle, Zelle is, you know how they say, you know, you don't touch a burning stove, what's that, too hot to handle? Zelle is too hot to handle, simply because of the underlying design of it by the banks that were terrified of losing market share to Cash App and Venmo. And so they hurried out this Zelle thing, knowing that there was a loophole in the law that meant they didn't have to, no law covered what Zelle is, and that they were free to just put it out there and have people get ripped off again and again and again, and say, ah, well,
34:54 Speaker 02 well, you should have read the mice-type of the terms and conditions. Zelle, I call it big bad Zelle for a reason. It doesn't have to be big bad Zelle. The banks could stop being piggy and offer consumer protections for it, and they don't.
35:14 Speaker 02 So you need to know that when you are asked, hey, do you have Zelle? The answer is, no, I don't.
35:22 Speaker 03 But William, thank you for teaching other people through this terrible experience you had, because it is very easy, if you're in Venmo or anything, to quickly like be like, I need to pay this person, put it in, you have to triple check. And I've almost made that mistake myself, and I think it's, you know, really important for us to, it's a good reminder for all of us, for sure.
35:44 Speaker 02 So I'm beating a dead horse, but...
35:47 Speaker 03 Oh, my gosh, are you going to talk about Zelle and Congress again?
35:51 Speaker 02 No, no. What I'm going to talk about is that I've never used Zelle Cash App or Venmo. And my wife, Laine, has a Venmo account. We have a separate account set up to fund it at a credit union, and it's all we use that account for. And she is so careful when she sends a payment to someone, because she always hears me talk, catastrophize about all these things that we hear from our listeners and viewers and readers. And so I just want you to know, this is dangerous stuff, because it's your money that takes a one-way trip with no easy way ever to recover it.
36:35 Speaker 02 And that's a problem. So we get to hear problems I've caused in a couple of days, because we have our next Clark stinks coming this Friday.
36:49 Speaker 03 You do look forward to it. You truly do.
36:52 Speaker 02 Well, it's personal growth. Is, you know, today, we have so many people who never want to admit a mistake. It's looked at in modern culture somehow as weakness.
37:06 Speaker 02 To acknowledge your errors, to learn. I mean, what a stupid thing. You hear it with politicians.
37:13 Speaker 03 Yes.
37:13 Speaker 02 You hear it with companies. Never admit that you made a mistake. What a weird thing.
37:19 Speaker 03 It's crazy. We all make mistakes all the time. That's how you learn.
37:22 Speaker 02 And how do you grow as a person? You grow being willing to learn from others. So we got more learning coming on Friday.
37:32 Speaker 03 School Hard Knocks.
37:34 Speaker 02 School of Clark coming up on Friday. School of Clark Stinks coming up Friday. And I want to thank you so much for joining us today. Hope you have a great rest of your day. And can't wait to be with you this Friday, where you get more empowerment through knowledge of ways to save more, spend less, and never, never, never, not ever let someone rip you off.
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