I'm all for empowerment and education, but the empirical evidence is that it doesn't work. That's why I say make it easy.

Maybe you'll take the cash out. So a credit card company or a bank that goes into the business of saying we're going to be the broker, we're going to sell you a mortgage that you're going to be able to pay off, we're going to help you reduce your credit card debt, we're going to help you save for retirement, we're going to put you into mutual funds that have low fees rather than high fees.

If people just put away what's left at the end of the month, that's a recipe for failure.

In a typical 401k plan, when you first become eligible you get a big pile of forms and you're told, fill out these forms if you want to join. Tell us how much amount you've saved and how you want to invest the money. In, under automatic enrollment you get that same pile of forms but the top page says, if you don't fill out these forms, we're going to enroll you anyway and we're going to enroll you at this saving rate and in these investments.

Recall that people like to do what most people think it is right to do; recall too that people like to do what most people actually do.

I think one lesson we have to learn is that there's a lot more risk than we're giving credit to, a lot more what economist calls systematic risk.

If rather than setting the minimum balance as the lowest possible amount, so we keep people in debt for as long as possible, we raise the minimum payment and encourage people to pay off their credit cards, we're going to make less money, but we're going to have costumers that are more solvent.