Fidelity Retirement Account Inflows Up 62%

Fidelity Investments on Wednesday said investors sent 62% more money into the world’s biggest mutual fund firm’s retirement accounts in early 2006 as Americans took bigger steps to prepare for retirement.

The sharp jump comes at a time when research studies show that Americans, who long had relied on increasingly scarce company pensions for retirement income, face gloomy prospects because many have not saved enough to live comfortably after leaving their jobs.

Between Jan. 1 and April 30, a time of year when many Americans fund private retirement accounts, Fidelity said flows into its retail retirement accounts, including products such as individual retirement accounts and 401(k) plans for the self-employed, grew 62%.

In the same time period one year earlier, Fidelity said flows increased by 21%.

Executives at the privately held, Boston-based company said a growing awareness that Social Security benefits needed to be supplemented by private savings helped drive the increase.

But Ellyn McColgan, who runs Fidelity’s brokerage unit, also said that access to Fidelity products through the company’s website plus its broad-reaching, new advertising campaign helped attract new money into the retirement accounts.

McColgan said more than half of the new accounts were opened online.

Fidelity has long prided itself on being at the cutting edge of technology, and its website has won awards for being easy to use and offering comprehensive information for savers.

The figures Fidelity supplied for the first time Wednesday do not include institutional 401(k) plans, a spokeswoman said.

Earlier in the year Fidelity said its retirement index, which measures retirement readiness, showed that about 83% of Americans acknowledged they were not saving enough for retirement.