While California has garnered the most recent headlines for its universal retirement savings account plan, Gail MarksJarvis at the Chicago Times notes Washington and Connecticut are also moving forward on the same front.

The conference in Chicago mentioned by MarksJarvis was organized by EOI, and included local representatives from the AARP, the Retirement Research Foundation, and the Joyce Foundation. National representatives from the Brookings Institution and the Center for Economic and Policy Research were also on hand.

The basic idea of an UVRA (as outlined in this post) is to use a state’s existing retirement or investment infrastructure (here in Washington State, its the Public Employees Retirement System) to pool the investments of thousands of workers at small- and medium-sized businesses.

Doing so allows for extremely low fees and professional fund management in a portable retirement plan that helps smaller businesses offer the same kinds of benefits as their larger competitors, and makes it easy for workers to save for retirement, no matter where they work.