are here. this has been a great morning. you heard from the boss here and he's all in and this is a joint venture. we have a great panel here so i want to keep moving. what i heard the president say was a lot of focus on what i call the two ps, promoting access in the retirement space and the president has been taking action on that. he directed us to take more action to help facilitate that. the treasury department has already taken action on that and the my ra space -- is dana grady here by the way? oh, you're way in the back. she is a small business owner who encouraged her employees to participate to help strengthen their retirement securities so she has a lot of participants. thank you for being a great spokesperson for this. i appreciate your help and i'm glad that it's working. we're going to talk more about financial security today and we have a fantastic panel of folks that are going to be talking and giving their views. >> we have a number of questions and i got a few questions on twitter as well. so we'll go with them time permitting i'm going to get right to the first question. gene is the financial editor for nbc's today show and the director of education for savvy money.com and she has a long career in journalism covering financial matters and has published several books on everybody's favorite topic of financial management and money and she's right here to my right. he'll hold applause, to my left is robin. she is the chief investment officer of united technologies in heartford and for me equally importa importantly she was appointed in 2013 to the pension benefits advisory committee and i have the privilege of chairing the board so i spent a lot of time with robin and it has been a labor of love and she educated me a lot. she chairs the committee that advises the new york stock exchange on the impact of policies and markets on institutional investors. as we continue to talk about the importance of state and local government and as someone that spent a lot of time in state and local government we're pleased to have vicki here who is with dekalb county board of health near atlanta. she was a leader on policy issues and has an emmy for her television production work and having watched you already i understand why you have an emmy so we're pleased to have you and last but certainly not least is a good friend of mine that's the head of global wealth and retirement solutions at merrill lynch at bank of america. he's had a stellar year and his career spans more than 20 years and includes time at the white house working on economic and domestic policy and in his spare time which i don't think he has much of he serves on the board that helps students in needily schools develop literally skills so now i ask you to give a round of applause to our panelists and i'm going to jump right into the questioning because we have a short period of time. i'm going to ask a question for all of you to answer and then an individual question of each of you and time permitting we have a few twitter questions and perhaps some audience questions and the question for the group is this, many people used to take retirement for granted. you get a pen, a pension and a party and in the defined benefit world offiester yearment now it seems like fewer assume they'll be able to require comfortably. what do you see as the most significant barrier to a secure retirement? and i know that you can get into -- this could be a one hour answer for each of you but if you could focus on what you see as the most significant barrier. andy we'll start with you and work our way around. >> thank you mr. secretary. the first thing we need to wrap our heads around is the fact that retirement itself has been transformed as a concept in our society and we heard that from the president. this is now a time of unprecedented opportunities and possibilities but also a risk and we need to expand the way we think about life in these bonus years. it's about how to think about work and how work is going to factor into later life. it's about health and cognitive decline and health related issues and it's how families are dealing with this new dynamic that we're experiencing we think training needs to be brought into the mainstream of american life. we'll talk about that as the panel continues. >> from my perspective t biggest barrier is that we're human and when we ask human beings to plan for retirement we're asking people to do things that are human nature. we're asking them to save which humans are not particularly good at. we're asking them to do it consistently and life always has a way of surprising you and getting in the way. we're asking people to invest consistently this which is sticking with the markets when the markets aren't a lot of fun and then we're asking them once they accumulated not to pull the money out and spend it all at once. so it's a really, really difficult challenge that i work with the aarp all the time on trying to educate people on how to do all of these things which nobody is really training us to do. so we're climbing a mountain that previous generations just didn't have to climb. >> thank you. >> when i had an opportunity to attend my first financial literacy workshop 16 years ago i met cindy who definitely gave us the tools that we needed through an organization called mother's voices georgia which is a nonprofit which has reached out to women in terms of helping them to plan a secure retirement and one of the barriers that makes the dialogue interesting is the issue of longevity. i just recently heard that they changed the category of old, old from 90 years old -- from 85 years old to 90 years old and so when you begin to talk to young people, especially women who are representing the millennials about saving and not outliving your assets that seems so far away. i say if orange is the new black then 90 is the new old, old. you never meet any retirees that say they have saved enough or too much so one of the definite critical education pieces we try to get across to women is your finances. you can always find a way to save. i love that we have the my ra in place. no matter what you do you need to begin the behavior and once you start that behavior you want to look at ways that if you are having critical issues dealing with finances like i did initially, trying to overcome some issues related to debt, trying to reduce that and using the tools but it's baby steps that will eventually get you to where you need to go. comfortable taking those steps you need to secure your economic future they need to take on further retirement. they're not going to have the pension fund that their parents and grandparents enjoyed so they need to think of their 401k not just as a savings plan but a retirement plan so they need to do three things. save early and save more resist the temptation of taking that money out when they change jobs but this is a portfolio appropriate for their age and circumstance. if they do it effectively they may have more money than ever in their life and may feel secure but how do you turn that money into a stream of lifetime income so you don't outlive it. employees don't know that. they think they need to move the plan and their assets and in some circumstances there's aggressive marketing urging them to do so and once they live their 401 k plan it's an irreversible decision and they can't get back in. once they're out they may find themselves vulnerable to conflicted investment advice and recommendations not in their best interest. hopefully there will be laws in place in the future to protect them. >> someone at the department of labor is doing something about that. is that right? i think so. let me continue with you then robin because there's two dimensions to the question i have for you. for the people that do have a 401k so what can you do to make sure that when they retire or leave a job because this is no longer our fathers or mothers generation when you work 30 years at the same place, more and more people bop around in that generation and how do you educate them? and the second part of the question gets back to what the president said which is ability -- about a third of the workers don't have access to a work place retirement plan so life is more challenging. social security alone in all likelihood is not going to be enough and i know that you thought about this and your boss and company which is forward le leaning will be there. how can we make sure that folks are educated about their choices. for those that don't and don't have anything right now what options are there out there and what else should we be doing? >> well, for companies, you know, they really need to change the way they offer different type of savings plans because they don't have the savings plan. they have to make it simple and really think about that default option. we talked about in the past how auto everything works. auto escalation auto enrollment. they're automatically enrolled and once we put them in their stay and we escalate that up to a maximum of 10% and the company puts in an additional age based contribution from 3 to 5.5% even if they're not contributing their own money into the plan. so it's very important. also the default, a robust default option, we have the lifetime income strategy and it's developed for employees that don't have a pension plan. it becomes less risky as a person gets to retirements and as their balance grows so does this guarenteed income strain so they don't outlive their money so it's very important for the industry to put these type of products in place that give people lifetime income security but flexibility that they want. for example on our plan it's unlike a traditional annuity in that you always have control over your balance so there's no penalties if you decide to take it out like traditional annuities. >> trending on social media right now are applications to united technologies. let me turn jean to you because we're obviously doing a lot of work with the treasury department and labor department and some regulatory proposals and at the same time we're working hard on education because we all have a shared interest in the importance of education and when i have someone from the media here i can't help but ask the question what do you think the media can do to help the public learn about financial markets and what we need to do to save for retirement and how we can make all of these correct choices? again in the leave it to beaver universe we didn't have to make these choices and our modern family world it's a different environment. so what can you do? >> i think the best thing the media can do is to not get overly focused on the markets. we have to have basic emergency cushions. i'm talking about a couple of thousand that can prevent you from sinking into credit card debt or prevent you from pulling money out of your 401k. we have to get into retirement accounts whether they're 401ks or my ras and we have to stay in that for years and years and years and years and we have to be invested which means we've got to be defaulted into a target date fund or to some other low cost relatively simple investment that people can understand. but when we get caught up on the details of puts and options and day trading and things that we don't need in order to achieve financial security, the media might be trying to karener additional ratings but i don't think we're doing people a great service. >> thank you. let me turn to you and at the outset i want to say thank you to b of a and merrill lynch because they have been incredibly helpful partners moving forward and i want to thank brian and the ceo of merrill as well that i met personally for your work in these issues. you've really been very, very helpful. you mentioned about longevity and so did vicki and if my memory serves me b of a has been doing a fair amount of work with the longevity center. can you tell us what you have learned from the work that you're doing regarding the evolving needs of a population that's living longer and what that means for financial security and what proactive steps, for instance, that we could be taking in light of what we're learning. >> great. thank you. the secretary is referring to work that we've done with the university of southern california and the davis school and we had the very good fortune some years ago of hiring a graduate of the davis school to join our team at merrill lynch and we were blown away frankly by the focus that first the financial media placed on the fact that there's one working on wall street and then subsequently we were blown away by how our clients embraced this much broader perspective around later life. over the last year or so we decided to double down on our work with usc and extended our work to offer training for all the advisors at merrill lynch and we had over a thousand advisors that either complete or work their way through a certification and today we are announcing what we think is a more exciting step forward which is to extend the work with usc so we'll be train their hr professionals around this usc program and what we're hoping is it will be a major step forward in terms of making work places much more age friendly and the partnership with usc is extraordinary and i would encourage everyone that's part of the conference to take some time and focus on what they're doing at usc davis and broadly in the field of gerentology. >> thank you. that's great. >> you talked about the work you have done and as we know women in the aggregate live longer than men and they often saved less and have lower social security income in no small measure because they made important decisions regarding child rearing et cetera. so that puts them at greater risk and you worked with a lot of women to prepare them for retirement. what's the most important set of advice that you give to women and what would you give to this audience today as we talk about women and financial security. >> thank you so much secretary perez. i think that in terms of the women that we outreach too coming from all walks of life and dealing with the challenges financially of child rearing ordealing with a relative who might be experiencing an illness in terms of the care giving role or in part time employment the challenge is staying consistent. the challenge is keeping that economic security or retirement goal ever present despite what sometime may seem like set backs. in terms of the financial education that reaches these women, it's reaching them where they're at. at that particular life point with whatever they're dealing with and being realistic about it whether or not they're dealing with divorce or whether or not they're dealing with an issue of care giving for an aging loved one but meeting those women where they're at financially. and not beating us up about it. we're all in this together. the other piece that i like to be mindful of is in terms of financial education one size does not fit all is my pantyhose. if we did that the entire world would come crashing to a close in one sized pantyhose fit all. so just like with financial education -- >> we're all processing the imagery of that metaphor right now. so we might need ten seconds or so to work through that. okay. we can proceed. >> so it needs to leave women and individuals where they're at and understand the system. how important it is. those systems that the president shared, those bedrocks, social security, medicare, so important for people to be educated about the rules but if we can make the rules a little bit more user friendly, just a little bit more user friendly. sometimes when i can't get to sleep at night i will try to read some of the rules and it will help me and have me out by 9:00 p.m.. but for those individuals who are seriously dealing with either comprehension issues and literacy issues ordealing with visual impairment making those rules more user friendly is something that we do all the time. it will be great if we can apply that for social security or medicare. >> great. thank you. i have two questions that came via twitter. we discuss them in part but this does give you a little bit of an opportunity. i'm going to combine them in one. one comes from the sorority which asks what advice would you give to someone trying to plan for a secure retirement? there's a related subset question from sage which is services and advocacy for lgbt elders which asked how can we bolster retirement savings for those that face high rates of poverty and lesser family and social support networks? i want to open it up if anyone has a question we'll go from you and to you and probably have time for those two questions. >> vicki touched on social security and i don't think we can put too great an emphasis on social security. by doing that they leave a ton of money on the table. and one way in which we need to be offering additional education is to people and is teach them not only how to best tap their social security but how to mix their social security with their other retirement accounts and which to draw from at which time. we have worked at aarp. we have calculators that help people figure this out but it's incredibly complicated so yeah i'm with you. simplify it as much as possible. >> the question from a student is very interesting because on one level the most important thing is to begin saving early. but it's important to remember that saving comes in many different forms and for millennials in particular one of the most important things they can do to begin suring up their finances and thinking about the future is paying down student debt and paying down debt is the financial equivalent of savings and as well keeping in mind that investments in human capital when you think about what longevity is doing and the fact that careers are going to be very lock and very varied those invest ms whether it's spending time-out of that sorority you referred to and in the classroom or subsequently around job training and job retraining with an anticipation that you'll have multiple careers those are all building the kind of capital that people are going to need for long and successful and secure financial lives. >> do you want to add anything. >> yes, just to elaborate on andy's point, it's very important to take a wholistic approach to financial wellness. so we are auto everything our young employees but at the same time we have to be very mindful of their other debt. so things like paying down student debt or thinking of buying a house or later saving for their child's education. you do not want to have a young person max out their credit cards and be saving 10% for retirement so there has to be a financial education on how to utilize debt appropriately. >> let me turn to you ma'am. you have a microphone right there and then you sir and we probably -- we'll see how we're doing on time. >> i love your shirt by the way. >> thank you. we're in the fight for 15 and as you know home care workers we make $13,000 a year or less. and we also get state funding as in food stamps. how can we say it in any suggestions? >> a lot of folks barely making enlds meat enter into the conversati conversation. >> i think everybody here is nodding their heads because it's really, really difficult and you should be paid more money which would make this problem go away. in the interim though, there are two essential ways to save. one way is to just do small chunks when there's small consistent pieces whether it's $5 or $50. every little bit helps and the other is if and when you get a small wind fall whether it's a tax refund or a birthday gift to just try to put as much of that away as you possibly can. and i know it may not always be possible but we do what we can and hope we make more money in the future. >> i was thinking about another moment when the president stood up here to talk about the need to implemented and propose and implemented a regulation with respect to home health workers because as a result of a loophole in the wake and hour loss you weren't entitled to minimum wage or overtime protections. it's been held up in the courts but we'll continue to keep fighting and working with you and we wouldn't have done that without the advocacy of others in this room. working to make sure that folks are rewarded for a hard day's work with a fair day's pay is what middle class economics is all about so we'll keep working on that and we have discussions about savings specific items but no better way to save than having a better wage. that's why we'll keep working. >> within an aging and longevity society we know that it's increasing rates of impairment. we can now diagnose these 10 or 25 years before simp on thes a pier and one of the first man fes kag manifestations is the ability to make good financial decisions. so how do we protect this? how do you protect cognitive impairment and advise them appropriately. >> thank you for making that point and we have been very involved on the ceo and coalition on alzheimer's and in connection with that americans are more fearful than almost any other health condition combined when they think about later life. in the financial services industry. there needs to be a wave of education around the signs of cognitive decline and also the bases of how they need to be handed from one person to another against the backdrop of cognitive decline. it's been great to see our primary securities regulator and the sec and other regulators beginning to point a lot more attention at these topics as well because the regulatory back top needs to be very very clear as well. >> i have one minute left. if you can ask a 20 second question we'll give you an answer. >> encouraging them through financial education that they too can say since they will have longer life expectancies. >> i couldn't agree more. one thing we worked with everybody on this table on is making sure that we have vehicles and mechanisms that are competent so that when we are out there in the work force we're out there able to serve everyone in the workforce with these critical tools and everyone at this table and many folks in this audience spent a lot of time work on that. i apologize that we can't do more. i'm really excited that we were able to get through this many questions. this is a remarkably distinguished panel. give it up for them one more time. thank you very much. [ applause ] also ceremonies honoring world war i and world war ii veterans. >> tonight, programs on world war i. starting at 8:00 p.m. humanitarian aid. the panel discusses the history for relief in belgium headed up by herbert hoover which provided humanitarian aid during world war i. at 10:00 p.m. woodrow wilson's second term from 1917 to 1921. once the u.s. entered the first world war in 1917 the majority of his efforts focused on foreign affairs and diplomacy. up next, medical researchers develop alzheimer's degrees and the need for more funding to study it. they haven

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