I'm so glad you've joined us 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.

I want to address something head on, and I'm going to make you potentially uncomfortable.

When's it okay to borrow against your 401k? Also, coming up later, I want to talk about what you

should be doing to protect yourself if you like to check bags on an airplane. I don't know why

you would, but if you do, we're going to talk about that. So 401ks or something that half of us in

the United States are privileged to work somewhere to have access to one. Because a 401K does something that makes a big difference in your life.

Because it's left to our own devices to go out and set up our own Roth IRA,

most of us might actually get the account set up,

but then we forget to fund it.

An important thing, right?

It's behavioral finance, you know, that something being done automatically

is something much more likely we stick to.

Something that manually requires we take an action, that's a harder thing for us to do.

So that's why the 401K has been kind of like a magic pill to get people saving for the future who might not have otherwise.

Because the money just comes out of your check before you get it. We auto enroll our employees

at my company and we do, I think it's automatically enroll them at 6%,

and I match it with 6%.

So if they do nothing, they're saving 12% of their pay in our default as we put them in a target retirement fund.

Because I want people to, as force of habit to be saving

money for the future. How do you mess that up? You take out loans against your 401k. And I know,

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