“Although voluntary contributions grew from 5.7% in 2021 to 7.9% in 2024, they are still insufficient to guarantee a decent retirement,” said a recent study by Vanguard and the Mexico association, how are we doing?
The study highlights that lack of income, low financial education and little trust in institutions continue to be the main obstacles to encouraging this savings.
This type of savings, which helps to complement the money that Mexicans have for their retirement, is very low in some Afores, due to the lack of knowledge of users about how to make these contributions and the distrust that this money can be expropriated by the government, according to the same study.
“Trust in institutions is definitely one of the basic ingredients,” said Sofía Ramírez, director of Mexico, how are we doing?
For the specialist, there is an effort on the part of the private initiative to enable tools such as calculators, which allow users to know how much money they can receive if they make additional contributions.
However, as was suggested before the approval of the pension reform in 2020, a good option is for employers to retain voluntary savings automatically.
Mari Nieves Lanzagorta, vice president of liaison of the Mexican Association of Afores (Amafore) said that they are already working with the Ministry of Finance to define mechanisms that promote voluntary savings.
For Juan Hernández, general director of Vanguard in Latin America, it is important that Mexico—being an economy in which 54.4% of workers do so in the informal sector—makes this migration that allows them social security and savings for retirement.
Furthermore, mechanisms must be sought so that people who have already worked formally continue to contribute despite migrating to informal employment.
“It is in the transition from a formal job to an informal one when the mandatory contribution is precisely lost,” said Hernández.
One of the proposals to expand this type of savings is to promote the use of digital accounts, since they grew from 4.1% in 2021 to 12.1% in 2024 and show that more and more people manage their finances from their cell phones.
