Nevin's Data "Points"

  We’re often told that actions — or lack thereof — have consequences. Indeed, this is the time of year where many a stressed-out parent often falls back on the admonition from that holiday classic “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” — you know, “you better watch out, you better not cry…” because Santa is keeping tabs.    In fact, as Christmas approached, it was not uncommon for my wife and I to caution our occasionally misbehaving brood that they had best be attentive to how their actions might be viewed by the big guy at the North Pole. That said, a few years back — when my kids were still “kids” (and “believers”) — we stumbled across an ingenious website; one that did more than caution. It actually purported to offer a real-time assessment of one’s "naughty or nice" status. Our parental admonitions notwithstanding, nothing we ever said or did had the impact of that website — if not on their behaviors (they were kids, after all), then certainly on their level of concern abo...

  Each year, the Oxford University Press proclaims a “word of the year,” — and this year they chose “rage bait [i] .” Now, even the Oxford proponents admit that this is actually TWO words (all while professing that they are not trying to “rage bait” folks by choosing two words) — distinguishing it from the “etymologically related”  clickbait  as having a more specific focus [ii]  on evoking anger, discord, and polarization.  In other words, whereas we once said “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me…”  Well, now it seems words can.  We are, of course, routinely inundated with negative assessments of American workers’ retirement readiness, retirement confidence, and financial acumen.  We’re told that the system is “broken,” that there’s a retirement “crisis,” that billions (if not trillions) of retirement savings have been “forgotten,” and that individuals think they will need about twice as much in retirement savings a...

A recent Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article asked what I view as a rhetorical question; “Do you really know what’s inside your 401(k)?” Rhetorical in that I suspect the answer from most people — certainly if they’re honest — is “no.” Now there are many aspects to a 401(k) that bear scrutiny, but the  article  was focused on target-date funds (TDFs) — a mechanism that I think has been a boon for most of the novice investors (and savers) that I suspect most 401(k) participants (still) are. You check one box (heck, these days that box is checked for you) and tap into the expertise — and ongoing expertise at that — of professional money managers to provide your retirement savings with a diversified portfolio mix. No longer do you have to concern yourself with weightings of stocks and bonds, value versus growth, domestic versus international — just leave it to the experts.  But the WSJ article’s focus was a cautionary note — mostly concerned at the unexpected things that a coll...

   There’s a “new” retirement crisis to fret about — and it involves so-called “junk” IRAs. You may have seen the recent Wall Street Journal’s headline that proclaimed “ Forgotten 401(k) Accounts Are Costing Americans Billions in Lost Investment Gains .” This particular assertion turns out to be another spurred by (yet another) proclamation from an IRA provider (PensionBee), though this one at least doesn’t manufacture quite as ludicrous a compounding of the size and number of those accounts as others [i]  have done. More precisely, the issue they raise is that smaller retirement plan balances can, and often are, legally expunged from the plan of their prior employer into an IRA.   Now, retirement plan professionals know how this works — those who sever (or who are severed from) employment with less than a $1,000 balance will likely have that distributed to them in cash, those with balances above $7,000 [ii]  will generally have the option to leave that bal...