Retirement Readiness Surges with Focus Shift to Actual Data

“Sure, it will probably be more work, and generate fewer clicks,” commented one industry source, “but it’s the right thing to do.” Yes, after years of relying on uninformed “guesses” from individuals ignorant of their financial needs and situation, the retirement industry, major media outlets, and a large number of academics have made a commitment to focus on actual data, rather than hypothetical extrapolations from incomplete datasets. Another explained, “we always thought that exaggerating the depth of the retirement crisis would encourage people to save more — but that turns out not to be the case.” Those projections affixed labels like “ magic ” to those extrapolated numbers based on surveys of uninformed workers, which not only ignored real differences in incomes, location and age, but were typically also averaged to further obscure accurate results. Likely fueled by previous reports of needed retirement savings, surveys of individuals routinely exaggerated the r...