Nevin's Data "Points"

  This weekend — for the first time in my life — I’ll spend Mother’s Day without Mom. For most of my adult life I lived too far away for a trip home for Mother’s Day to be…practical. Not that I didn’t look for — and find — ways to connect with her during the year. But in my heart, Mother’s Day called for a special level of acknowledgement. That said, there’s an emptiness this year where that phone call should be. No need to time it around church or Sunday lunch — or the other calls she’d get. Since her passing last December, these past months have been…rough. My siblings and I have, at various times, made trips to go through Mom’s house — she was a “gatherer” of family mementos across generations — much of which might, in other eyes, be characterized as “junk.” And yet, in going through the multitudinous boxes of photos and “stuff,” the elementary school awards (and grade cards), not to mention the cards and letters — so many letters — that we wrote to her over the years before thi...

   Your best laid plans can quickly go awry if your beneficiaries are clueless. For the past several months, I’ve been dealing with the disposition of my late mother’s estate. In the overall scheme of things, it is neither large, nor particularly complex. As I’ve noted before, Mom did a solid job of not only managing her finances while alive, but in terms of making sure that I (as eldest perhaps, but more specifically as executor) was aware of the various insurance policies, retirement accounts and property.  In that respect, she was doubtless “better” than many parents in discussing such matters before her passing (though none of that happened until after my father passed). Moreover, despite their modest means, they set up a living trust back when my Dad was with us — specifically to avoid the complexities of going through probate in an effort to make it easier for us. And prior to her passing, Mom made sure I had all the account numbers and phone numbers, and we set up ...

  Last year, we took some family to the nearby Great Smoky Mountains in search of a waterfall of note — one that the guidebooks said was “readily accessible.”  That said, it took longer than we thought — we’d come up around a curve on the mountain trail, sure that it would be right there —– only to find (just) another curve. As we crossed folks coming back down from the falls, we’d (breathlessly) ask — “how much further is it?” — and while the responses were varied in terms of their accuracy and descriptive depth, they all added “it’s worth it.”  And you know what? It was.   Well, believe it or not, we’re nearing another kind of summit; a week from today we’ll be about halfway through the 2025 NAPA 401(k) Summit. It’s later than “normal” this year — and it’s been a long-time coming. Indeed, your Summit Steering committee has spent nearly a year putting this all together — leveraging YOUR input on topics, each has aligned themselves with a specific workshop — lit...

   It’s an odd thing to admit in Financial Literacy Month — but I’ve been a financial literacy skeptic.  Not always, of course. Once upon a time I was one of those industry voices decrying the burden placed on employment-based retirement plans. Employers (and advisors) who — in the course of a 25-minute workshop — had to convey the range of concepts required to make knowledgeable investment decisions to an audience of adults who had never been exposed to any of that prior to that session. Considering all the (relatively) useless things that ARE mandated in school curriculums, some basic finance concepts seemed like a pretty reasonable “ask.” State Steps And though it’s been a long time coming, a number of states [i]  now do require students to take a financial literacy course for high school graduation — and that number continues to climb. That said, what constitutes complying with that requirement — varies. And, if it’s like a lot of the classes I was required to ta...

  I recently picked up a book that states “why (almost) everything you know about the US retirement system is wrong” — and it’s definitely worth a read. The book — titled  The Real Retirement Crisis: Why (Almost) Everything You Know About the US Retirement System Is Wrong   — is the work of American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Andrew Biggs — and it’s a comprehensive assessment of any number of the misstatements, mischaracterizations, flawed assumptions and downright obfuscations that plague any realistic assessment of the nation’s retirement system. Indeed, he argues that “factoids, however compelling, are no substitute for facts.”   The Goal Biggs outlines the goal of a retirement system as one that “allows individuals to maintain their preretirement standard of living in retirement.” In that regard, he (and academics generally) would say that lower-income individuals' preretirement are well-served by Social Security’s benefit structure. Indeed, the argu...