Financial Literacy and the Power of Preservation

By Tom Hawkins | April 3, 2026

On March 31, 2026 I had the opportunity to attend the SPARK Champions for Financial Literacy event in Washington, DC, kicking off Financial Literacy Month, which takes place in April.

The event featured numerous speakers, including policy headliners Kevin Hassett, Director, National Economic Council and Luke Pettit, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Financial Institutions – both of whom emphasized the importance of financial literacy in attaining economic and policy objectives. A slate of other distinguished speakers focused on the importance of financial literacy in improving lives, with many sharing highly relevant personal and professional experiences that spoke directly to its transformative power in encouraging long-term saving and investment behaviors.

Spencer Williams, founder & CEO of Retirement Clearinghouse and the driving force behind auto portability and the Portability Services Network, spoke to an often-neglected topic when it comes to financial literacy: the ability to preserve savings once they’ve been earned – a goal that our retirement system has routinely fallen short on, despite a myriad of successful retirement savings public policies that have expanded access, increased participation and grown savings.

To address the preservation problem, Williams passionately advocated for the building out of a “neutral, industry-scale clearinghouse [that] connects recordkeepers, custodians and participant accounts through shared standards, APIs, and automated workflows” – the topic of a recent whitepaper that Williams authored and released on 3/05/26.

I, and others at the event that I spoke to believed that Williams made a compelling case, and I’ve included his speech below.

Spencer Williams’ 3/31/26 Address to the SPARK Champions for Financial Literacy

Good afternoon, everyone.

When we talk about financial literacy, we often focus on the visible starting points — budgeting, debt management, or the basics of investing. But I would argue that one of the most underappreciated measures of true financial literacy is the ability to preserve savings once they've been earned — particularly retirement savings.

Think about this for a moment: preservation is not just an outcome, it's a behavior — a set of decisions that reflect both knowledge and discipline. A financially literate individual doesn't just save; they keep those savings intact through job changes, market volatility, and life's disruptions. In many ways, preservation is the practical test of financial literacy over time.

In the retirement system, we see the consequences when preservation fails. Each year, billions of dollars are lost to cash-outs when workers change jobs. The median American might change employers a dozen times during their career, and every time, they face a decision that can quietly undermine decades of future security. A small early withdrawal may seem harmless, but compounded over 30 years, the opportunity cost can be staggering.

That's why preservation isn't simply a personal virtue — it's a policy challenge. And policy, in turn, depends on infrastructure. Financial literacy education must extend beyond "how to invest" toward "how to preserve." Financial leaders and policymakers need to understand that the friction in our system — multiple accounts, fragmented recordkeeping, and portability barriers — can quietly erode the power of long-term saving. But understanding the problem is not enough. We need shared, digital infrastructure — the kind of connective tissue between recordkeepers, custodians, employers, and government programs — that turns good policy into repeatable, scalable outcomes. Without that infrastructure, even the best-designed policies struggle to reach the people they are meant to protect.

We also have to recognize that preservation behavior is deeply psychological. Studies show that defaults, rather than education alone, often drive better outcomes. When accounts automatically follow workers from job to job, or when small balances are consolidated instead of cashed out, the individual's literacy is reinforced by system design. But those defaults don't happen in a vacuum — they require interoperable systems, standardized data exchange, and common operating rules that connect providers across the ecosystem. Financial knowledge, policy, plan design and infrastructure, working together, create lasting preservation.

Consider what happens when infrastructure is absent. Today, a worker who changes jobs and wants to roll over a small retirement balance is largely on their own — navigating paper forms, phone calls, and bilateral processes between two institutions that often have no standard way of communicating with one another. The result is predictable: friction wins. Accounts are cashed out, stranded, or forgotten. This is not a failure of literacy — it's a failure of infrastructure. And it's a failure that falls hardest on younger, lower-income, and minority workers — the very populations that benefit most from the compounding power of long-term preservation.

Now imagine a different model — one in which a neutral, industry-scale clearinghouse connects recordkeepers, custodians and participant accounts through shared standards, APIs, and automated workflows. In that model, when a worker changes jobs, their savings move with them — seamlessly, securely, and without requiring the worker to become an expert in rollover mechanics. That is infrastructure shaping policy outcomes. That is what it looks like when we build systems that reinforce literacy rather than test it.

This is also where infrastructure becomes a catalyst for policy innovation. For example, the Federal Thrift Savings plan is in the early days of exploring how they might operationalize paperless rollovers – per SECURE 2.0. However real-world effectiveness depends on whether the retirement system has the capability to identify eligible savers, verify contributions, and deliver funds accurately and efficiently. A clearinghouse model provides the connective infrastructure to do exactly that: linking government programs to the providers and accounts where savers already are, and doing so through standardized, auditable processes that satisfy both fiduciary and regulatory requirements.

To me, this is where our collective responsibility lies as professionals. We understand the language of IRAs, 401(k)s, and rollover mechanics, but for the worker — especially the younger or lower-income worker — comprehension hinges on simplicity and consistency. If we want financial literacy to be more than a static skill set, we must make preservation an intuitive part of the system. That means building tools, policies, and technologies — like clearinghouses and auto-portability mechanisms — that translate literacy into durable outcomes. It means investing in the infrastructure layer that allows good policy to scale and ensuring that the systems we build today can evolve to meet tomorrow's needs — from digital rollovers to retirement dashboards to income portability.

In short, preservation is not the end of financial literacy — it is its proof. The ability to maintain retirement savings through the unpredictable turns of a working life demonstrates understanding, discipline, and foresight. And when our systems make preservation easier, we amplify those traits across the workforce. Infrastructure is how we move from aspiration to execution, from pilot programs to nationwide impact.

As we continue developing programs, policies, and partnerships to improve financial literacy, let's remember: protecting what people have already saved is the clearest measure of whether their knowledge — and our system — are truly working. And the surest way to protect those savings at scale is to build the infrastructure that makes preservation the default, not the exception.

Thank you.