"Although the average retirement-account balance increased by about 7 percent, about 45 percent of the workers we studied saw their balances decrease by thousands of dollars between the spring 2009 and the fall of 2011. These losses can be even more troublesome than they initially seem: If someone had $10,000 in 2008 and lost 25 percent of it, they'd need a gain of 33 percent just to stay even. In fact, we found that the average gain was far smaller than what would have been needed to recover from the steep losses in 2008."  MORE >>