It seems that a lot of things in the US are carefully designed to keep you in servitude to your current employer, which I find a little ironic coming from the land of the free.
Where I live, Australia, employers are required to put in approx 10 percent of an employee’s full time wages into a superannuation fund. This is linked via reportable wages to the tax office and companies will eventually find themselves under a lot of unpleasant attention from the Australian Tax Office if they don’t make regular payments for you.
This is basically “invisible” to workers, it’s essentially factored into the cost to have an employee by the business.The superannuation fund can be a “default preferred” one selected by the business, or an employee nominated one, and you can transfer/roll over your accumulated funds between any superannuation fund you like as you hop between jobs. You can draw from it in some specific dire circumstances, but usually you can only access it at retirement age.
For most Australians it ticks over in the background by itself. Most super funds easily beat inflation by a fair margin most of the time, and definitely in the long term. The tax office keeps track of balances for you and gives you an easy way to see what’s where and the option to roll any scattered amounts into your current main superannuation fund.
You can also contribute extra to your super fund and there are tax benefits if you do. The government actively encourages investment in super, because that way they don’t have to provide much in the way of old age pensions come 2050 or so when all workers will have some sort of decent retirement amount.
Is there any form of “mandatory” saving like that in the US? I know you guys have company pension plans of some sort, is there a government version?