Nevin's Data "Points"

In most professional sports, the clock – the time remaining in the contest – is a factor (baseball being a notable exception – those nine innings are going to be played, regardless of how long it takes). The clock can be your enemy if you’re trying to hang on to a slender lead – or it can be your friend – if your team needs some extra time to catch up. Retirement also has a clock – the problem is, we generally can’t see it. Little wonder that time – our retirement clock – is perhaps the biggest uncertainty when it comes to retirement planning. Not just the when it starts, but mostly the “how long” aspect. Surveys suggest that fear of outliving one’s assets is a primary concern about retirement – little wonder since so few have stopped to figure out how much they have, not to mention the uncertainty as to how long it has to last. I recently read an interesting article by Dr. Joe Coughlin, founder and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology AgeLab (and closing keyno...

One of the great concerns of our industry — when we aren’t worrying if people have saved enough for retirement — is worrying about how those savings are going to last through retirement. Enter to that debate a recent report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) that basically takes the Labor Department to task for not doing enough to encourage the use of lifetime income options in workplace retirement plans. Sure enough, it’s been hard for lifetime income options to get traction with retirement plans. The GAO rightly outlines a number of the concerns typically articulated with these options — which are well known to those who have looked to remedy the situation (see “ 5 Reasons Why More Plans Don’t Offer Retirement Income Options” ). GAO Alternatives So, what suggestions does the GAO have for the DOL? Well, the GAO has several specific suggestions, including that the DOL: do more to clarify the safe harbor for selecting an annuity provider; consider providing lega...

Early on a bright Tuesday morning in 2001, I was in the middle of a cross-country flight, literally running from one terminal to another in Dallas, when my cell phone rang. It was my wife. I had been on an American Airlines flight heading for L.A., after all — and at that time, not much else was known about the first plane that struck the World Trade Center. I thought she had to be misunderstanding what she had seen on TV. Would that she had… That day, when family and friends were so dear and precious to us all, I spent in a hotel room in Dallas. It was perhaps the longest day — and loneliest night — of my life. In fact, I was to spend the next several days in Dallas — there were no planes flying, no rental cars to be had — separated from home and family by hundreds of insurmountable miles for three interminably long days. As that week drew to a close, I finally was able to get a rental car and begin a long two-day journey home. While it was a long, lonely drive, it gave me a lot ...

It’s not hard to find scary headlines about 401(k)s – seems as though every week you read how people aren’t saving enough, are worried that they aren’t saving enough, aren’t saving enough and aren’t worried that they aren’t saving enough… Then in the past couple of weeks, a new twist. First a headline that proclaims that “ The 401(k) is Wreaking Havoc on Retirement .” Then one that purports to share “ Why 401(k)s are bad for people without a college degree .” As it turns out, the articles are both about the same study, “ Disadvantages of the Less Educated: Education and Contributory Pensions at Work .” The authors of that study (ChangHwan Kim of the University of Kansas and Christopher Tamborini of the Social Security Administration) offer a basic premise – that less educated workers aren’t as well served as college graduates by the current defined contribution-centric plan structures (notably 401(k)s) that predominate the retirement landscape today – which is to say that they are...

Preparing for retirement inevitably brings up questions of time: When will you retire? How long will your retirement last? How long do you have to prepare? Often we don’t take advantage of the time we have, and sometimes we don’t have the time we thought we would. It was just five years ago this week that my wife and I, having just deposited my youngest off for his first semester of college, spent our drive home up the East Coast with Hurricane Irene (and the reports of her potential destruction and probable landfalls) close behind. We arrived home, unloaded in record time, and went straight to the local hardware store to stock up for the coming storm. As you might imagine, we weren’t the only ones to do so. And what we had most hoped to acquire (a generator) was not to be found — there, or at that moment, apparently anywhere in the Nutmeg State. What made that situation all the more infuriating was that, while the prospect of a hurricane landfall in Connecticut was relatively un...