I’m so frustrated with scare tactics. I logged into my NetBenefits portal at Fidelity yesterday, and got the above headline, about “___, is your 401(k) on life support?”. First of all, I don’t even have a 401(k). Courtesy of working for a non-profit employer, the accounts I have through Fidelity’s NetBenefits are a 403(b) and a 457(b). They can’t even get their scare tactics targeted right.

So obviously, Edelman Financial Engines wants me to pay them to manage my 403b portfolio, at which time they’ll take away the scare tactic panel. Kind of like when you are turning down app ads and website popups, that instead of saying something neutral like “no thanks”, it instead makes you push a button with text like “I’m fine with my portfolio crashing.”

Below that, there’s a graph of my 403b balance over time. But it’s not a statistically reasonably represented graph of my account over its full 20 year duration, and starting from $0. Instead, this graph is zoomed in with a non-zero Y-axis scale, and only over the last 3 years, so that at one market downturn in late 2022 at first glance it looks like my balance is minimal across all of that time and dropped to almost zero during that downturn. Designed to add stress to your life.

Beware scare tactics and misleading presentations. You can do better, get reasonable presentations and education instead.