How well are people doing at saving for retirement?

A retirement wellness planner from Principal Financial Group isaimed at helping workers figure that out.

Of course, there is considerable disagreement amongexperts about how much people should be saving. Theconventional wisdom says they should plan on replacing 70–80percent of their current income with savings, while some say thatcould be way too little and others that it’sactually too much.

As a result, many workers are understandably concerned abouttheir ability to hit what appears to be a movingtarget—particularly when medical expenses can upset even themost meticulous of planning.

And of course women need to be particularly careful abouttheir savings rates, since they live longer than men and are morelikely to have heavier medical expenses—but they tend to save lessfor retirement, out of salaries that lag behind men’s incomes.

The Principal tool is part of the firm’s “Move to the GreenChallenge,” which is intended to present in color how wellindividuals are doing.

Users of the tool are given a personalized score, within a rangeof red, yellow or green, that indicates how well they’re doing atretirement saving. Green means a saver is set to replace 70–85percent of their income in retirement.

The online planner uses interactive sliders, prompts, and areal-time savings graph to show how changes made now can affectfinancial security at retirement.

Principal launched a similar initiative last year, and reportedthat it brought positive results. Of those who participated, nearlya third increased their deferral amount to 10 percent of their pay,an increase of 3.75 percentage points.

In addition, since the retirement wellness planner was launched,the number of participants increasing their deferrals has risen by30 percent—and three times more participants have used the newplanner compared to the earlier iteration of the retirementplanning tool.