The Crushingly Expensive Mistake Killing Your Retirement
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/02/the-crushingly-expensive-mistake-killing-your-retirement/283866/
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Humans are horrible at understanding compound interest, and it's making our golden years much less so.
Think about your 401(k). The first thing you probably look at when you pick your funds is their returns. It's only human nature. Everybody likes to think about their nest eggs growing and growing and growing—especially if they're growing a little bit faster than everybody else's. But, in this case, human nature is costing you hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The sad fact is that returns aren't certain, but fees are. Now, maybe everything will go according to plan, and your 401(k) will be partying like it's 1999. Maybe the 1 percent—or more—that you're paying in fees will actually buy you market-beating returns. But probably not. You can see this in the chart to the left from Vanguard. It shows the percentage of actively managed funds that have underperformed index funds over the short and longer hauls, net of fees. Which is to say, most of them. It's hard enough for funds to beat their benchmarks over just one to three-year periods. But that gets damn near impossible the longer you go. Once you account for survivorship bias—that bad funds go bust, and disappear from the sample—almost 80 percent of actively managed funds don't beat simple index funds over 10 to 15-year periods.
In the meantime, you're stuck paying fees. Those fees don't sound too bad—just 1 percent!—but this is where our total lack of intuition for how compounding works really hurts us. Let's try an example: what's 0.99 to the 40th power? It's not exactly a calculation you can do in your head. It's not even one you can estimate. But it's the kind of calculation that you need to do to figure out how much your 401(k) fees are costing you.
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You are not going to beat them at their game. You may be able to run in and scrape some meager portion and get away safely, but you will not beat them. Think of crows circling a lion eating his fresh kill. You are a crow. You do not beat the lion. He could kill you in one bite if he gets you.
There are few normal people you have the ability to "beat" the wealthy (who have professional investors working for them) at their own game.
Might that be electing Republicans?
Just thought I'd ask... 
And pension funds never invest in the markets. 
such thing as job security anymore, they have abdicated any responsibility for their employees retirement years. Interesting how unions and pensions have been decimated over the last 33 years.
"Human Resources". Like most comodities, the people are there be used and disposed of after they are no longer useful.
I was fairly lucky about 10 years ago because the company I worked with matched half of the employee contribution up to the first 6% of salary on 401k plans. I also chose an aggressive mix of mutual funds that were invested in the Asian markets and tech.
I also kicked in to the ESOP plan when the stock price was near its lowest and the price tripled while I held. Overall, I drew a 120% return over four years, so I was pleased that I took the risk. I also was the beneficiary of some good timing since I sold all of the stock about three weeks before the market crashed in 2008. 
