My second dose of the personal touch was my own company's long-awaited meeting with our new financial advisor to introduce us to our new service provider and the plan administration aspects that go along with it.

We're a small, national company and like everyone else in the United States, we've weathered the recent financial hard times. But we're still standing, and our employees still have a DC plan to take part in, should they choose to do so.

Unfortunately, like many companies of our size, educating employees about that DC plan or providing ongoing encouragement to increase deferrals or to change our investment allocations to mirror market conditions … well, that was not necessarily the highest priority over the past couple of years.

If you were motivated, you continued to make your contributions, you did your own research and you called the service provider to manage your plan. If not, not much happened. I fell into that second camp.

So we were particularly delighted to meet our new guy – Seth Hoffman, with the Philadelphia-area A.P. Lubrano and Company, talking about our new New York Life plan (trust me, that's the end of the product placement).

It was rather refreshing to get a dose of that hands-on expertise and even the opportunity for a face-to-face meeting. I know that more than a few of us, who'd completely overlooked the notion that the whole pre-tax nature of our 401(k) means we won't even notice that we're making a small contribution (and might even get immediate tax savings in April), were certainly excited to hear about that.

We're also happy to have a modernized, web-based platform where the motivated (or even the totally uninformed) can go to learn more, do some long-range retirement planning and then mess around with our investments, even on a daily basis, to our hearts' content. Or, we can always give him a call, too.

The harder part, as Hoffman pointed out, is that doing the very minimum is probably not going to amount to much of anything when our retirement age rolls around. It's better than doing nothing, but the difference between saving 4 percent of your wages and committing to a much wiser 10 percent or 12 percent – well, that takes forethought and discipline.

Hoffman says his job has been a lot better since 2009, when everyone jumped ship from their 401(k)s - layoffs and massive economic crisis will do that to people – but participation is markedly improved in recent years. He said he does have to be wary of participants who go from doing nothing to being "super-aggressive" in their investments as he feels – and maybe some of you do, as well, that a "market correction" may be lurking on the horizon.

I chose to ignore that particular gloomy notion and instead am more committed to getting back in the investment game. I'm also going to try to ignore the perhaps-a-little-too-much-discussed option we now have for loans from our 401(k) savings, the dangerous fiscal logic of which is quite unnerving (paying and being taxed to borrow money from yourself that you've already taken away from yourself for someone else to manage).

Skin in the game. What an idea. Now, about that forethought and discipline part.