Nevin's Data "Points"

Several weeks back, my wife and I sat down with a financial planner to review and update our financial plans. Doing so brought with it a bit of personal trepidation since, being “in the business” I not only had a working knowledge of what needed to be done, I also had a pretty good sense of what hadn’t been done, and what hadn’t been done the way it should have been done in some time. As I surrendered copies of the statements from my three separate 401(k) accounts, rollover IRA, traditional IRA, and SEP-IRA, I found myself wondering (again) why I hadn’t gotten around to consolidating some of those accounts. More and more Americans are finding themselves with multiple savings accounts, not only because of the relatively consistent pattern of job change in the American economy (see “Tenure, Tracked” ), but because those job changes frequently result in rollovers to individual retirement accounts. On the other hand, in recent years, it has gotten easier to simply leave your 401(k) with ...

Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal’s Anne Tergesen wrote a story titled “Mixed bag for auto-enrollment.” Citing data presented at last week’s EBRI policy forum,¹ the article  claimed “employees who are automatically enrolled in their workplace savings plans save less than those who sign up on their own initiative.” She then proceeded to cite Aon Hewitt data presented at the policy forum that illustrated how workers at various salary levels at plans that offered automatic enrollment saved at a lower rate, on average, than workers at the same salary levels at plans that didn’t offer automatic enrollment. The article then went on to note that “The data confirms an analysis EBRI performed for The Wall Street Journal in 2011.” Well, not exactly. In a response to an article titled “401(k) Law Suppresses Saving for Retirement” that Tergesen wrote in 2011,  EBRI Research Director Jack VanDerhei challenged the premise behind the headline of that article, explainin...

This past weekend I joined the throngs of humanity that went to the theaters to see Iron Man 3. I grew up reading Marvel Comics, and, for the very most part, seeing those characters brought to life on the big screen has been a real treat. I had been curious about the new Iron Man movie for some time, but wasn’t sure if it could live up to expectations based on the prior films. It’s hard to escape the endless promotions for these summer blockbusters, but I made a conscious effort to do so, and even avoided reading the reviews of the film until after I had had a chance to see it for myself. That decision involved some financial “risk” as anyone who has taken a family to the theater recently can attest. There have, however, been disappointments along the way―sometimes the acting was bad, sometimes the storyline was (unintentionally) laughable, and sometimes the movie fell short of what I had anticipated simply because my expectations were set so high. Over the years, the Retiremen...

There’s a saying that “the best laid plans of mice and men often go astray,” and one need look no further than the experience of a morning commute to see the principle in action. While we all head to different places from different places, most head out for work at what for each of us is likely a consistent, regular time. That timing may be driven by external or internal factors: a mass transit schedule, by our desire to avoid traffic congestion, the constraints of fellow passengers, or simply by a need to arrive at our place of work at a specific time. But for most of us, on most days, the regularity of that schedule provides a certain dependable start to our days. It doesn’t take much to disrupt that start, unfortunately—as anyone who has ever awakened to an unexpected snowfall, encountered the impact of a traffic accident on a major thoroughfare, or slept through a snooze alarm can attest. Sometimes we can make up the time loss imposed on our commute, sometimes we simply have to...