New Documentary Explores America’s 401(k) Crisis

Broken Eggs: The Looming Retirement Crisis in America is the new documentary from financier Chad Parks that looks at the retirement problem that most people in America are facing: preparation.

Parks is the CEO and founder of the retirement website The Online 401(k), which allows small business-oriented individuals the opportunity to plan a 401(k), regardless of their company’s program. Since the symbol of the website is an egg, Broken Eggs is certainly the appropriate title.

The website allows for people to make sense of all the confusing information about 401(k), pensions and Social Security that is on the internet.

“For certain generations that might be appropriate,” Parks said. “People in their 60s may have a three-legged stool: personal savings, pension and Social Security, but when you move down through the ages into people in their 50s, 40s, 30s, 20s, some people commented that it is really a pogo stick.”

Parks and his filming crew began their interview process on April 17. They met with 125 to 150 random individuals on the street and traveled more than 6,000 miles in six weeks to accrue information for their film.

“I think we’re getting a good cross section and a pretty good profile. We were pleasantly surprised,” Parks said. “What we found was a very broad-based awareness and a very broad-based opinion set. A lot of people would start off with, ‘I don’t have much to say on it,’ but once they got going, they found out that they do and that there were a lot of pockets of well thought out [opinions], definitely pockets of very passionate people.”

Another interesting part of their subjects’ opinions was the lack of political association.

“In today’s political environment, everyone is a right wing conservative or a left wing liberal, but there is a lot of neutrality with this,” Parks said. “It is not politics. This rises above politics. It is a societal issue, not a red or blue state issue. There were a lot of positive things even in rural areas.”

The launch date for Broken Eggs is September 12, 2012. Watch the trailer for the film below:

This article was originally published on AllMediaNY.com