The National Association for the Self Employed released a survey in May (OK I'm a bit late on this) showing that the majority of micro-businesses (defined by NASE as 10 or fewer employees) owners and employees are unprepared for retirement. From the press release:
"a large majority of owners and employees of America's micro-businesses do not have access to retirement plans and are financially unprepared for retirement. More than 3,000 owners of companies with 10 or fewer employees participated in the survey."
The survey shows that 80% of all micro-businesses surveyed do not offer any kind of retirement plan and that the primary barrier - listed by 62% of the respondents - is the cost of administering and contributing to a retirement plan.
What is really interesting to me is despite the huge amount of financial institution marketing money spent trying to attract small business retirement accounts, 40% of the respondents are not familiar with and/or understand the retirement plan options available.
While the cost of contributing to retirement is clearly an issue for many, plan adminstration should not be a barrier. My micro-business retirement plan (covering myself and my partner) takes about 2 hours a year to administer. This appears to be an education problem to me. I guess the financial industry needs to spend even more money marketing small business retirement plans.
Related to this, Anita Campbell at Small Business Trends lists retirement as one of the three things keeping entrepreneurs awake at night.
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