Nevin's Data "Points"

Last week Beloit College released the Beloit College Mindset List, as it has each August since 1998. Originally created as a reminder to faculty to be aware of dated references, the list provides a “look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college.” For example, this year’s freshman class, born in 1994, have never known a time when history didn’t have its own channel, when there were tan M&Ms (or when there weren’t blue ones), or when “It’s A Wonderful Life” was shown more than twice during the holidays. They grew up talking about “who shot Mr. Burns?” not “Who Shot J.R.?” and while for them there’s always been an NFL franchise in Jacksonville, they’ve never known one in Los Angeles. That floppy disk icon for “save” in the word processing document is as anachronistic to them as the “CC” reference to “carbon copy” likely was to their parents’ email. And, perhaps most significantly, they have never lived in a world without the World Wid...

I was recently asked about the so-called 4 percent “rule.” That’s the rule of thumb(1) that many financial consultants rely on as a formula for how much money can be withdrawn from retirement savings every year (generally adjusted for inflation) without running out of money. Of course, like so many of the “assumptions” about retirement, certainly in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, that withdrawal rule of thumb has drawn additional scrutiny.(2) At the time, my comment was that the 4 percent guideline is just that—a guideline. What’s not as clear is whether adhering to that guideline produces an income stream in retirement that will be enough to live on. How much are people actually withdrawing from their retirement accounts? At a recent EBRI policy forum,(3) Craig Copeland, senior research associate at the Employee Benefit Research Institute, explained that the median IRA individual withdrawal rates amounted to 5.5 percent of the account balance in 2010, thoug...

As a teenager, I remember the occasional visits to the local swimming pool. I also remember that about once an hour, the lifeguards on duty would periodically clear the pool, ostensibly to clean out debris, to enforce a certain rest break on the swimmers (and doubtless for the lifeguards), and perhaps to assure that all the swimmers were still able to get out of the pool. Then, after what seemed to my teenage senses like an eternity, the lifeguards would blow a whistle—the “all-clear” signal for everyone to jump back in the pool. They were very strict about this—and kids were routinely banned for an hour, or even the rest of the day for jumping in “early.” As a result, even after the whistle, most of us would hesitate and look around to make sure that we weren’t the only ones going in. With the Supreme Court’s recent decision on the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) behind us, industry surveys suggest that employers are turning ...

An acquaintance of mine recently described to me the challenges of trying to help a family member rebalance their retirement portfolio, which at the moment was split between a 401(k), 403(b), and an IRA. Curious, I asked him how the funds in the IRA were invested. He laughed and said, “Which one?” The data suggest that my friend’s family member isn’t alone in that regard; the average IRA balance is about a third higher and the median (mid-point) balance almost 42 percent larger when multiple individual retirement accounts (IRAs) owned by an individual are taken into account, according to a recent Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) analysis based on its unique EBRI IRA Database.™ 1 In fact, according to a recent EBRI report 2 , in 2010 the average IRA individual balance (all accounts from the same person combined) was $91,864, while the median balance was $25,296. By comparison, the average and median account balance of all IRAs was $67,438 and $17,863, re...