Maybe 401(k) plan sponsors are on the wrong side of the generation gap – at least when it comes to communicating with their under 30 year-old employees – when I asked the question, Face it. Maybe we’re not using the right medium to communicate 401(k)?. I suggested text messaging, and here’s some supporting anecdotal evidence. Mark Liberman writing in his Language Log Blog tells a story about the conversation he overheard among several of the younger academics at the Google Faculty Summit — 30- to 40-year-olds. They were complaining that their students think that email is for old people (a category that this group is not yet used to being part of).

So if we communicate 401(k) plans to employees for whom English is a second language, e.g., Spanish, maybe we should think about having our 401(k) plans being communicated by people who speak IM and SMS.