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Is there a more dispiriting financial situation than working hard and investing intelligently for your assets only to have some or indeed all of them pinched from your back pocket by a sophisticated scam?

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has recently warned against this possibility, calling on taxpayers to beware of “a surge of new, sophisticated email phishing scams”, particularly during the Christmas and New Year period.

This warning follows IRS data charting how the incidence of online scams rose by 60% during 2018 – an especially dramatic rise when it is considered that each of the previous years recorded a decline. Furthermore, with the vast majority of scams occurring at the end and the beginning of the year, it is clear that the IRS message is timely.

A study published by The Pew Charitable Trusts in 2019 revealed that only 13% of self-employed individuals who run a ‘one-man-band’ type enterprise are enrolled in a retirement plan, compared to almost 75% of traditional employees. Things are hardly better among those involved in multi-person firms; the study found that only 29.9% of this group were currently participating in retirement plans. *