Nevin's Data "Points"

Last month, the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) held a hearing titled “Pension Savings: Are Workers Saving Enough for Retirement?” The answer to that question is, of course, about as varied as the individual circumstances it contemplates, but certainly at a high level, the best answer is, “it depends.” It depends on your definition of “enough,” for one thing—and it might well depend on your definition of retirement, certainly as to when retirement begins, not to mention your assumptions about saving and/or working during that period.(1) While those are individual choices (sometimes “choices” imposed on us), they can obviously make a big difference in terms of result. For public policy purposes, EBRI has defined adequate retirement income as having the financial resources to cover basic expenses plus uninsured medical costs in retirement. Working from that definition as a starting point, along with an assumption that retirement represents the ce...

For me, the hardest part of writing has always been that first sentence. I don’t usually struggle with the topic, the angle to take, the length, the clever title, nor even the research and analysis that might be required to support the point(s) being made. All of those take time, energy, and effort, of course—but nothing like the effort I put into crafting those first few words. What makes that all the more ironic, particularly in view of the energy expended, is that the first sentence I wind up using often isn’t the one with which I began. It’s just the one that keeps me from getting started. Aside from strained finances, “getting started” is perhaps one of the most commonly cited problems in saving. Most know the importance of saving, and appreciate the risk(s) of not having an emergency fund, or lacking adequate retirement savings. We have goals—both short- and long-term—that can be quantified, the ability to take advantage of payroll deductions, and/or regular account transfers...

As the nation continues to grapple with fiscal challenges, the subject of so-called “tax expenditures,” (the amount of tax breaks accorded various programs) has attracted a great deal of attention. Critics of the current tax preferences structure for work place retirement plans have questioned the efficacy of those preferences relative to the savings produced. In that vein, a recent study¹ examined the experience of the Danish pension system to consider the relative impact of government retirement-savings tax preferences on savings behaviors, as well as the impacts on savings patterns of a mandate that required all Danish citizens to contribute 1 percent of their earnings to a retirement savings account from 1998 until 2003. In explaining their rationale for drawing on the Danish pension experience, the study’s authors described that nation’s pension system as “broadly similar in structure” to that in the United States and other developed countries, in that it has individual acco...

One of my favorite memories of visiting my grandparents over the holidays was working on jigsaw puzzles. These were generally large, complicated affairs—whose construction was spread over days, as various family members would stop by to work on a section, to build on a border, or sometimes contribute a single piece they would spot as they drifted by on their way to another activity. Perched in a prominent place throughout would be the puzzle lid with that all-important picture of what we were working toward to help keep all those individual, and sometimes fleeting, efforts in the proper perspective, that made it possible to differentiate the blue of what would appear to be sky from what would turn out to be an important, but obscure section of mountain stream. In retirement plans, one of the more intransigent concerns for policy makers, providers, and plan sponsors alike is what has been called the “annuity puzzle”—the reluctance of American workers to embrace annuities as a distr...