retirement savings, one vote short

and if your job doesn't come with a 401k, this one was built for you.

Alaska just came within a single vote of giving workers a built-in way to save for retirement, and then it slipped away. Lawmakers passed it this spring, but it didn't make it into law.

Here's what it would have done. If your employer doesn't offer a retirement plan, the state would have set one up for you automatically. A small slice of each paycheck, five percent, would go into an investment account in your name.

You could always opt out if you didn't want in. But the point was to flip the default, so saving happens on its own instead of being the thing we all mean to set up someday and never get to.

It was aimed mostly at folks working smaller jobs and lower-wage jobs, the same people least likely to have a plan through work. For a lot of us up here, that's the whole gap.

When it came back for one last try last week, it landed one vote short of becoming law. So for now, nothing changes, and setting up retirement savings is still on you.

It's the kind of thing that quietly shapes what your sixties look like, which is why one vote stung this much.