Nevin's Data "Points"

 I’ve spent my entire working career working with retirement plans—but most of it not focused on a retirement plan of my own. In that sense, I am perhaps like many, maybe most of you. Oh, I thought about retirement (a lot, just not mine), maxed out my 401(k) (when I wasn’t co-funding college tuitions), and was at least intellectually cognizant of the potential costs of living for decades without a salaried paycheck. Much has been made of how difficult it is for younger workers to grasp the reality of retirement—but the reality is that retirement “myopia” is not limited to younger workers. That said, and as you will hopefully have seen in the lead post today, I have announced my “retirement” —though it’s not retirement [i] in the traditional cessation of work sense. Yes, while I love what I do and the people I do it with (for the very most part)—I’ve been cranking out a daily news service (and then some) pretty much every working day (including vacations) across multip...

You may have missed it, but there’s been a bit of a “hub-bub” brewing on social media…about the impact of, and perhaps even the utility of, social media. Here’s some thoughts—and some tips.  JD Carlson of Retireholics “fame” kicked things off with a post intriguingly titled “Forget About Social Media Content and Run Your 401(k) Business.” Oh, there were words [i] that followed, but you really didn’t have to read more than that to see where he was going. Well, about a nanosecond after that post appeared on…social media… Sheri Fitts who, as you may know, spends a fair amount of her time and energy helping advisors (and other retirement professionals) be more effective on…social media… pushed back on JD’s basic premise. A bit. Her argument was basically that while social media was important (we’ll come back to that), doing so without a clear focus or strategy was a mistake—but that ignoring the marketing impact of social media was perhaps a larger one.  And then, ...

If you work with TPAs—third party administrators—you might want to avoid bugging them this week.  As you may well know (certainly if you work with TPAs), this year, Monday (Oct. 17th) is the deadline to file Form 5500s, and for most TPAs, that’s a pretty all-consuming focus. So much so that every year on the day AFTER the Form 5500 filing deadline, John Hancock declares an annual day of recognition for TPAs .  Now, to its credit, John Hancock goes so far as to note that National TPA Day is also a reminder to financial professionals (especially those still getting established) that partnering with TPAs may be an important pathway to success. Not that everyone feels that way, of course. I’m talking about the disconnects in focus between retirement plan advisors and TPAs—an issue that is, perhaps, as old as ERISA itself—this “tension” between these two critical roles. Not in every case, of course—there are plenty of advisors that will tell you how many times their...

The future is an uncertain thing, and planning for uncertainty inevitably involves making some assumptions. Here are seven that, done improperly, can—yes, derail your retirement realities. How Long You’ll Work Perhaps the most important assumption is when you plan to quit working, or perhaps more accurately, when you plan to start drawing down your retirement funds. Today most Americans are doing so at 62, though 65 seems to be the most common assumption—and while using 70 (or later) will surely boost your projected outcomes (it both gives you more time to save and reduces the time that you will be drawing down those savings), it may not be realistic for many individuals. Indeed, the 2022 Retirement Confidence Survey from the nonpartisan Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) notes that the age at which workers expect to retire has been slowly rising. In 1991, just 11% of workers expected to retire after age 65. By 2022 that number had nearly quadrupled; 41% of wor...