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Back in the Good Old Days…

This week I’ll commemorate one of those “big” birthdays — the ones with a zero in it. However good you feel about your life and your accomplishments, it’s hard not to look back with some fondness on the “good old days,” when things seemed simpler and less complicated.

Remember how, back in the good old days…

We actually had to fill out a form to join our retirement savings plan at work — and we had to wait a year after being hired to do so.

There was nothing automatic about enrollment. We had to decide for ourselves to sign up — and how much to save.

We didn’t have to worry about deciding to make contributions on a pre-tax or after-tax basis… because it was all after-tax.

In the enrollment meeting, we’d ask the expert helping us fill out the form how much we should put in which funds — and he’d tell us he couldn’t tell us.

We had to pick our own investments — and we only had four choices!

We could only change our retirement plan investments once a quarter — and we had to do that via a form… that had to be turned in six weeks before the end of that quarter.

Our requests to transfer balances — the ones we made six weeks before the end of the quarter — weren’t actually made until a couple of weeks after that quarter-end.

We’d have to wait for the paper statement to arrive to know what our balance was — though we could check out our mutual fund investments in the newspaper (hey, that was supposedly important to some people).

We didn’t have to contribute to our DB plan. But then, when we changed jobs before 10 years had passed, we got nothing from that DB plan.

Ah yes. The “good old days,” when things seemed simpler and less complicated — even if they weren’t necessarily better.

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