Nevin's Data "Points"

In just a couple of weeks, tens of thousands of students (including a daughter of mine) will graduate from college.   For most, it’s a journey of joys, trials and tribulations, an education, not just from a textbook or a professor’s wisdom, but the insights that one can only get from actually living through a different stage of life.   Those students set out upon that journey years ago, and, doubtless following careful deliberation and the counsel of friends, families, and a few trusted advisors, a course was set.   A course that many “adjusted” – by choice and sometimes of necessity – over the course of the last few years, but a course for their future, nonetheless. Now the question is – what will they do next? As parents, we spend a lot of time, energy, and money trying to help our children make good choices, but at a certain point, most of us step back, grit our teeth (and sometimes close our eyes), and hope that they do.   Those decisions aren’t always th...

Last week, EBRI Research Director Jack VanDerhei testified [i] before the House Ways & Means Committee on the subject of “Tax Reform and Tax-Favored Retirement Accounts”, a hearing described as considering “…the current menu of options for retirement savings—both with respect to employer-based defined contribution plans and with respect to IRAs.”   According to Committee Chairman David Camp (R-MI), the hearing was to “…explore whether, as part of comprehensive tax reform, various reform options could achieve the three goals of simplification, efficiency, and increasing retirement and financial security for American families.” That hearing preceded by just a day Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kurt Conrad’s (D-North Dakota) unveiling of his Fiscal Commission Budget Plan (see link here ).    That plan [ii] referenced the original Bowles-Simpson Fiscal Commission’s “Illustrative” Tax Reform option under which the exclusion for employer-provided health insuranc...

This weekend marks the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the now iconic RMS Titanic, at the time the world’s largest ocean liner. Its passengers included some of the wealthiest people in the world, as well as a large number of emigrants seeking a new life in North America. On the ocean liner’s maiden—and only—voyage, it carried 2,244 people, 1,514 of whom would perish as a result of a decision to carry only enough lifeboats to accommodate about half those on board. Despite that, the tale of Titanic’s closing hours is generally one of an orderly, “women and children first” evacuation, with the band playing on while passengers stood in line and waited their turn. In an NPR report this week titled “ Why Didn’t Passengers Panic on the Titanic? ” David Savage, an economist and Queensland University in Australia, compared the behavior of the passengers on the Titanic with those on the Lusitania, another ship that also sunk at about the same time. Both involved luxury liners, both had...

April is Financial Literacy Month, and National Retirement Planning Week, sponsored by the National Retirement Planning Coalition (of which EBRI’s America Savings Education Council (ASEC) is a member) is April 9–13. Both events serve to remind us all of the importance not only of saving, but of establishing specific goals for saving. I was pleased, therefore, this past month to help one daughter set up her first SEP-IRA—and even more pleased to about the same time learn that my other daughter was, of her own volition, making a conscious effort to set aside what seemed to her father to be a fairly substantial portion of her modest income in savings. These are things I knew to do when I was their age, of course, but things I must admit took me a few years to act on. It’s easy, in the normal press of life, to put off thinking about retirement, much less thinking about saving for a period of life many can hardly imagine. We all know we should do it—but some figure that it will take...

If you think it’s complicated trying to determine an individual’s retirement funding needs, imagine trying to do so for all American workers. That was the topic of a Senate Banking subcommittee hearing last week titled “Retirement (In)security: Examining the Retirement Savings Deficit,” at which EBRI Research Director Jack VanDerhei was asked to testify.(1) When EBRI modeled the retirement savings gap of Baby Boomers and Gen Xers earlier this year, we found that between 43 and 44 percent of the households were projected to be at risk of not having adequate retirement income for BASIC retirement expenses plus uninsured health care costs—though that was 5–8 percentage points LOWER than what we found in 2003. That’s right: In terms of that retirement savings gap, American households are better off today than they were nine years ago—even after the financial and real estate market crises in 2008 and 2009. Measuring retirement income adequacy is an extremely important and complex topic,...