WASHINGTON, April 5 (UPI) -- The 2005 Retirement Confidence Survey says Americans know they should be contributing to retirement plans, but many still are not.
The survey by the Employee Benefit Research Institute and Mathew Greenwald & Associates Inc. found some 78 percent of U.S. workers are eligible for retirement plans where employers make a matching contribution but only about 82 percent take part, and of them 66 percent said they wouldn't have minded being signed up automatically when they were first hired.
About 72 percent of the respondents said an employer contribution of up to 5 percent of their salaries would make them much more likely or somewhat more likely to participate in a retirement savings plan at work.
Other factors cited to help workers contribute to retirement plans are an investment option that automatically provides workers a more conservative investment allocation as their retirement date approaches, and a provision that automatically raises workers' contributions by a fixed amount or percentage when they get a raise.
And 68 percent of those surveyed said they are skeptical Social Security will be able to pay them the kind of benefits current recipients are receiving.
The survey queried 1,253 people in January and has an error rate of 3 percentage points.
