Nevin's Data "Points"

  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...

  “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...

   Could someone please explain to me why the retirement industry keeps publishing ridiculous, uninformed and often ludicrous notions of retirement income needs? Honestly, I have no earthly idea what value any rational thinking person would attach to the guesses that an uninformed public makes about retirement income needs. But then why any credible source would take those guesses and then AVERAGE them (cause you know how much more accurate an average is [i] ) for publication is — well, it’s the kind of thing that makes my head hurt (particularly after repeated banging of my head on a table after reading another). The latest I stumbled across came from  BlackRock , which — based on a survey of “1,000 national registered voters in the United States” — declared that $2.191 million is the “average expected amount of savings needed for retirement.” Seriously? No wonder among that same group just 22% were deemed to be “extremely or very confident they will have enough money to...

  It’s hard to believe that it’s now been five years ago that many of us went into our places of work, packed up, and went home for what most thought would be a week, maybe two — and wound up being a lot more than that. I was reminded of just how long it had been at a meeting last week — a group that first gathered a little more than five years ago. Honestly, until it came up in discussions, I hadn’t realized how long it had been — and how much has changed since. In March 2020, my wife and I had just returned from a funeral in the Boston area. While the worst of what we would come to learn about COVID was — well, yet to be learned — we knew that cautions were in order. So we drove, rather than flew to the event — which wound up being full of strangers (many of whom were in what would come to be acknowledged as “vulnerable” health categories). In hindsight, what might have been a “super spreader” event didn’t turn out to be one —even though less than 48 hours later the governor of t...

  This past weekend most of America underwent a rather painful change — though it’s probably only just setting in. I’m talking about the legally mandated move to Daylight Saving Time (for most of us [i] ). That’s right, at 2:00 a.m. on March 9, clocks around the nation “sprang forward,” reversing course from last fall when the move was to “fall back” to standard time. It’s a “movement” laid at the feet of none other than Benjamin Franklin who, in what’s been characterized as a “satirical”  letter  to the editor of  The Journal of Paris  in 1784 pitched “the economy of using sunshine instead of candles.”  Mr. Franklin may have been satirical, but the economic rationale for this artificial time contrivance lingers on. It was certainly a factor in 1916 when Germany saw adjusting the time as helpful to its war effort. Great Britain embraced the same logic the following year, and by March 1918 [ii]  the (now at war) United States was on board — well, s...

  Two years into “retirement,” I feel like I have learned some things worth passing along — to you, or those of your acquaintance who may be considering taking the retirement “plunge.” I’ve taken a lot of good-natured ribbing over the past two years as to how I “suck” at retirement. That said, I’ve noticed that most of the folks telling you what retirement “should” be haven’t actually experienced it. Consequently, I’ve learned to take that counsel with a grain of salt.  Here’s some stuff that I have learned on my “journey”…  Make Sure You’re Retiring TO Something Someone has said that retirement is when you get to “stop living at work and start working at living.” A long time ago I was counseled that you should never run from a job you don’t like, but rather head towards one you do — the concern being that if you’re in the former category, you’re likely to trade the proverbial frying pan for the fire.  I think the same thing is true when it comes to retirement. Grant...