Robert Brokamp

How to improve your 401k and reducing your taxes by giving to charity.

You're listening to the Saturday Personal Finance Edition of Motley Fool Money.

I'm Robert Brokamp, and this week we're going to skip the financial headlines and go straight to the interview, which is with my longtime colleague, Buck Hartzell.

We talk about how the Motley Fool's 401k was actually not very good when we were first hired, how we worked with the company to improve the plan, and how you might be able to get your employer to do the same.

More than 100 million Americans participate in defined contribution retirement plans such as, you know, 401ks, 403bs.

Collectively, these plans hold more than $13 trillion in assets.

For many Americans, contributing to an employer-sponsored plan is the primary way they're saving for retirement.

Unfortunately, not all these plans are excellent, and you're stuck with the investment choices and features chosen by your employer.

Or are you?

Here to join me to talk about the steps you could take to possibly improve your plan is Buck Hartzell, a senior analyst here at The Motley Fool and, like me, an inaugural member of The Fool's very own 401 committee.

Buck, welcome to the show.

So let's talk about our history doing this, because we've been doing this at our own company.

We have been at The Fool for a long time.

We both joined in the 1990s.

If we were to rank all our employees, 375 of them by tenure, you're number 10, I'm number 16.

So we're a couple of pretty old fools.

I'm number 10.

So one of the things that we did way back when was to work on our 401k.

But let's take a quick walk down memory lane here.

What do you remember about the Fool's 401k when we started back in the 1990s?