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MyRA (My Retirement Account) is a program offering a new retirement savings account for individuals looking for a simple, safe, and affordable way to start saving. Savers will be able to open an account with as a little as $25 and contribute $5 or more every payday. MyRAs balances will never go down, and there will be no fees. MyRAs will be initially offered through employers and will be backed by the full faith and credit of the United States.

This article highlights the results of an FDIC study of the effectiveness of the Money Smart financial education program.

During 2011 and part of 2012, the FDIC conducted a second nationwide survey of FDIC-insured depository institutions to assess their efforts to serve unbanked and underbanked individuals and families. This survey focuses on banks' basic transaction and savings account programs, auxiliary product and service offerings, financial education and outreach efforts, and perceived challenges as obstacles in offering financial products and services to unbanked and underbanked consumers.

This article summarizes results from the FDIC's Model Safe Accounts pilot, which was launched to determine the feasibility of banks offering affordable transaction and savings accounts to bring more individuals into the financial mainstream.

This article provides an overview of the literature on best practices for retirement savings plan design and financial education in the workplace. Without a successful plan design, financial education will not be effective and even a well-structured plan can fail to achieve retirement savings goals without financial education. The main components of a retirement savings program that employers must consider include options for enrollment, investment choices, employer matching of contributions, and distributions over the working career and at retirement.

Minority groups, particularly Hispanics and Blacks, are less likely to use formal financial advice compared to their White counterparts and have lower levels of financial literacy on average. This gap in literacy may have important implications for savings, investing, and retirement planning. To better reach these groups and improve financial literacy, the literature recommends making access to financial education easier, targeting the education to the population, and delivering it through preferred methods.

This article provides a plain-language description of behavioral economics and the role of common biases in financial decisionmaking, and reviews ways in which the findings of behavioral economics can help structure financial education and public policy.

This short article briefly summarizes and provides a link to the final report on the FDIC Survey of Bank Efforts to Serve the Unbanked and Underbanked. The survey was conducted in 2008 and the report was released in 2009. The FDIC retained Dove Consulting to help administer the survey of banks during 2008. The voluntary survey consisted of mail-in questionnaires administered to a stratified random sample of about 1,300 banks. The nationally representative sample was selected from the population of federally insured banks and thrifts with retail branch operations.

This article presents best practices and lessons learnt from on the experiences of the National Endowment for Financial Education® (NEFE), a private, nonprofit, nonpartisan and noncommercial foundation committed to increas- ing access to financial education and to empowering in- dividuals to make positive and sound financial decision.

This article discusses the results of and lessons learnt from the Financial Opportunities Project (FOP), a comprehensive effort by the Center for Economic Progress identify, implement, and disseminate strategies for integrating financial services and asset-building opportunities with community-based tax-preparation services at IRS Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) sites.