Last week, the General Assembly passed the Illinois Secure Choice Savings Program. Gov. Pat Quinn is expected to sign the measure into law before leaving office, and in doing so will make Illinois a pioneer among states looking to defuse a retirement time bomb.

In 2012, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill into lawwhich will eventually require businesses with five or more employees that do not offer a retirement plan to enroll them in a new type of savings plan based on IRAs. The state of California has established the California Secure Choice Retirement Savings Trust and board to oversee the program, which has started a market analysis and feasibility study. Several other states, including Oregon, Vermont, and Connecticut, are evaluating the feasibility of establishing a public retirement plan.

The percentage of workers confident about having enough money for a comfortable retirement increased in 2014, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute. Each year, the institute conducts a Retirement Confidence Survey, asking respondents to rate their level of confidence—from very confident, somewhat confident, not too confident and not at all confident—on a variety of retirement issues. Click the graphs below to learn workers’ confidence in having enough money to live comfortably throughout their retirement years, their confidence in having enough money to take care of basic expenses in retirement, and their confidence in having enough money to take care of medical expenses in retirement.

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EBRI2014RetirementSurvey.pdf