Nevin's Data "Points"

A recent opinion piece by Teresa Ghilarducci in the New York Times took on what she termed a “ridiculous approach to retirement,” drawn from what appears to be a series of “ad hoc” dinner conversations with friends about their “retirement plans and prospects.” Most of the op-ed focused on the perceived shortfalls of the voluntary retirement savings system: People don’t have enough savings, don’t know how much “enough” is, make inaccurate assumptions about the length of their lives and their ability to extend their working careers, and aren’t able to find qualified help to help them make more appropriate savings decisions. In place of the current system, which Ghilarducci maintains “will always fall short,” she proposes “a way out” via mandatory savings in addition to the current Social Security withholding. Consider that, just three sentences into the op-ed, she posits the jaw-dropping statistic that 75 percent of Americans nearing retirement age in 2010 had less than...

A couple of months back, my wife noticed a water spot on the ceiling of our dining room. Now, it didn’t look fresh, but considering that that ceiling was directly underneath the master bath, she had the good sense to call a plumber. Sure enough, there was a leaky gasket—and from the look of it, one that had been there for some time before we took ownership. Fortunately, the leak was small, and the damage was minimal. Even more fortunately, we took the time to have the plumber check out the other bathrooms, and found the makings of similar, future problems well before the “leakage” became serious. Homes aren’t the only place with the potential for problems with leakage. A recent report on 401(k) loan defaults suggests that “leakage”—the money being drawn out of retirement plans prior to retirement —is a lot larger than a number of industry and government reports have indicated. In fact, the report ( online here ) claims that “the leakage could be as high as $37 billion per...

A recent paper from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College was titled “401(k) Plans in 2010: An Update from the SCF.” The SCF 1 (perhaps better known to non-researchers as the Survey of Consumer Finances) is, as its name suggests, a survey of consumer households “to provide detailed information on the finances of U.S. families.” It’s conducted every three years by the Federal Reserve, and is eagerly awaited and widely used—from analysis at the Federal Reserve and other branches of government to scholarly work at the major economic research centers. The 2010 version was published in June. As valuable as the SCF information is, it’s important to remember that it contains self-reported information from approximately 6,500 households in 2010, which is to say the results are what individuals told the surveying organizations on a range of household finance issues (typically over a 90 minute period); of those households, only about 2,100 had defined contribu...

By some accounts, inertia has long been the bane of the voluntary retirement system—and a great deal of money and time has been spent overcoming the reluctance of workers to become savers, and of savers to do so at levels sufficient to achieve their retirement goals.   That same inertia likely accounts for the fact that, once set on a savings course, or better still, set on one that improves on that initial setting, 1   participants in overwhelming numbers appear to “stay the course”—and do so through good times and times that aren’t as good.   So, what happens to those participants who stay the course, those “steady,” consistent participants?    The Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI), through the EBRI/ICI Participant-Directed Retirement Plan Data Collection Project, has long tracked the changes in consistent participant accounts in a database that is the largest, most representative repository of information about individual 401(k) plan parti...

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the need to fix the “broken” 401(k) plan.   Some say it disproportionately benefits higher-paid workers, some claim it can’t provide a level of retirement income sufficient to meet lower-income needs, and still others maintain it can’t provide that level of security for anyone .   And, as often as not, those sentiments arise as part of a discussion where folks wistfully talk about the “good old days” when everybody had a defined benefit pension, and people didn’t have to worry about saving for retirement.   Only problem is—those “good old days” never really existed, nor were they as good as we “remember” them. Consider that only a quarter of those age 65 or older had pension income in 1975, the year after ERISA was signed into law.   The highest level ever was the early 1990s, when fewer than   4 in 10 (both public- and private-sector workers) reported pension income, according to EBRI tabulations of the 1976–2011 Cu...