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Top 10 Pet Peeves About the Retirement Industry — Part II

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  Last week, I shared   five of my Top 10 Pet Peeves   about the Retirement Industry. Here’s the rest of the list. Making “apples to oranges” comparisons of world pension systems. Let’s face it — nobody wants to be “average.” And yet, there are now a handful of retirement industry consultants that, each year, publish a ranking of how the world’s retirement systems rate — and year after year the United States generally comes in about the middle of the pack. Considering just how diverse these systems and the populations they serve are — one might well wonder at the need to rank them. But rank them they do, employing a relatively complex rating system to do so. The  most recent was by Mercer  — who, once again — held the U.S. in relatively poor esteem compared with the Netherlands, Iceland, Denmark and Israel. The Nordic countries are a perennial favorite here — though they all happen to be (much) smaller in population, and more culturally and racially monolithic than the U.S. They all al
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10 Pet Peeves About the Retirement Industry

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   Life is full of annoyances – all the better to appreciate the blessings that surround us. That said, there are things about the retirement industry that really bug me.  I recently had the privilege of being part of the Leafhouse National Retirement Symposium. The theme was unfiltered – the unvarnished truth.  And it seemed an appropriate forum to share some of the things about the retirement industry that really bug me.  Here’s the list: Using the average or median retirement balance as a proxy for retirement readiness. Generally speaking, retirement plans are comprised of a myriad of individual circumstances – participants of ages that run from late teens to beyond traditional retirement, savings behaviors based on income – and age – and company match… Not to mention that this might be only a half dozen years of a worker’s accumulation, with the rest on some other recordkeeping platform… Why any rational person would think that combining those disparate elements and then either div
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Preparing for "Landfall"

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   The images and stories of the horrific path of destruction left by Hurricane Helene have been both eye-opening and heart-breaking – a tragic reminder of the uncertainty of life. Who would have thought that a hurricane coming off the Gulf would wreak so much havoc in the hills of North Carolina and Tennessee?  But as the recovery from Helene begins – and we now wonder what Milton will do, perhaps to many already struggling. As we sit here and pray for the best while many prepare for the worst, I’m mindful of my last serious brush with nature’s fury. It was 2011, and we had just dropped our youngest off for his first semester of college in North Carolina, stopped off long enough in Washington, DC to check in with our daughters (both in college there at the time), and then sped home up the east coast to our then-home in Connecticut with reports of Hurricane Irene’s potential destruction and probable landfall(s) close behind. We arrived home, unloaded in record time, and rushed straight
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A Retiring Mind(set)

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  I’ve written previously – albeit just a couple of times – about my decision to “retire.” Not that I don’t have stories to share, and perhaps even insights to impart. [i]   I’ve mostly held off because (a) people keep telling me I “suck” at retirement, and (b) I have come to believe that every retirement experience is unique.  That said, of late, I have become aware of just how many folks write and counsel about retirement – who are actually well short of that milestone. I’m not saying that guidance is irrelevant – I’m just saying that I have found that the reality is… different. My good friend and podcasting partner Fred Reish (who hasn’t yet crossed over into retirement, it bears noting) came up with the idea of doing a podcast where we talk to retirement industry people about their retirement(s). We’ve now done  three of those interviews  – and I hope that you’ll come check them out.  In the most  recent episode , [ii]  Fred thought it would be good to turn the tables, so to speak
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A Retirement Crisis of Complicity

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   A recent headline asks: “ Why Aren’t We Talking About America’s Retirement Crisis?”   Really? It seems to me that that’s ALL we’re talking about! Even more ironically, that headline appeared in an op-ed crafted by none other than Teresa Ghilarducci (and her new co-author, Christopher Cook) who, so far as I can discern, talks (and writes books) about little other than the so-called “crisis.” And this specific op-ed, as hers often do, got picked up in syndication (see  this link for details ).   But then, this week I stumbled across a LinkedIn post from Andrew Biggs, which matter-of-factly stated, “After a period of trying-in-good-faith, I've concluded I have to be more, um, forthright in calling out, shall we say, misinformation regarding Americans' retirement income security.” Said another way, it appears that Mr. Biggs has come to the conclusion –  as I have  – that polite commentary and even-handed discussions are insufficient to put to bed what continue to be extreme misc
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