Please stay tuned for important disclosure information at the conclusion of this episode.

Welcome to Investing Insights. I'm your host, Ivana Hampton. The retirement outlook looks brighter for some and dimmer for others. How do you feel about yours? The Employment Retirement

Income Security Act, known as ERISA, turns 50 years old this year. The landmark law offers

protections for people with workplace plans, but some believe the system is broken. So what would

it take to repair it? Mark Miller is the author of Retirement Reboot and publisher of the Retirement Revised Newsletter.

Thanks for joining me, Mark.

Hi, Ivana, thanks for having me.

Let's start with why Arisa was created and has the law been successful?

Yeah, Arisa was passed into law in 1974, actually, Labor Day weekend.

And it was initially it was a response to abuses that had been going on in the

defined benefit pension space in the private sector, some really high profile crash and burns

of pension plans that prompted Congress to pass

ERISA, which was really for the first time kind of tightened up regulation and oversight of

employer-provided pensions. And back in that time, this is before things like 401ks and

IRAs were around. So it really was the world of defined benefit pensions.

But it's been very successful in the sense that employer-sponsored retirement plans are a lot safer as a result of ERISA.

But the increased regulation also, many believe, help set the stage for sort of the decline of the traditional pension as more employers decided that the expense and regulation perhaps wasn't worth it.

So this kind of massive shift that we've seen over the years away from traditional pensions and towards the 401k defined contribution system, some point to ERISA.

Not in a sense of, well, this was a bad idea, but just as sort of an unintended consequence that

happened. And we just thought that for this article that I did for the New York Times about this,

that it would be interesting to use the anniversary, the 50th anniversary of the passage of ERISA, just sort of take stock of

where things are 50 years down the road.

...