People who stuck with their 401k plan through thick and thin for the past 10 years more than doubled their account balances, according to the latest data from Fidelity Investments on the behavior of 11 million plan participants.
But a separate study found that many workers are not faring well with retirement saving.
The average account balance for savers who are now 55 or older and have been participating in their plan continuously for 10 years was $211,300 at the end of the third quarter, up from $96,000 a decade ago, according to Fidelity.
Keep in mind: About two-thirds of the account-balance gain is due to savers' own contributions, plus their employer match, and one-third of the gain is due to market returns, according to Fidelity.
Workers pumped an average 8.2% of their earnings into their 401k's, a figure that hasn't changed for almost two years. But a sign of optimism, perhaps: 4.2% of savers increased their contribution rate, a bigger portion than the 3.1% who decreased it.
But the relatively rosy picture painted by the Fidelity data doesn't describe the many Americans who have no access to a 401k plan, or, if they do, misjudge stock market risk along the way.
Among full-time workers, just 38% of Latinos, 54% of workers ages 25 to 43 and 38% of those in the lowest income bracket have access to a workplace savings plan, according to "The Failure of the 401(k)," a report published Nov. 9 by Demos, a nonpartisan public-policy and research organization that focuses on lower-income Americans.
Only 45% of workers in the service industry have access to a workplace plan, compared with 80% of management and professional workers, the report said.
And while just 35% of the lowest-paid workers can contribute to a workplace plan, 84% of those in the highest income quartile have access to retirement benefits at work.
Meanwhile, those who planned to retire in 2008 or early 2009 faced the following staggering reality: Individual retirement plans lost $2 trillion in value in the stock market plunge.
Twenty-one percent of plan participants have more than 80% of their assets in stocks, while 38% don't have any money in stocks, according to the Demos report.
The good news, perhaps, is that Fidelity found that fewer savers put 100% of their assets into equities in the third quarter: 13% did so, down from 14.5% in the same period a year ago
This article was reported by Andrea Coombes for MarketWatch.
