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...

While it’s the celebration following a successful harvest held by the Pilgrims and members of the Wampanoag tribe in 1621 that provides most of the imagery around the holiday, Thanksgiving didn’t become a national observance until much later. Incredibly, it wasn’t marked as a national observance until 1863—right in the middle of the Civil War, and at a time when, arguably, there was little for which to be thankful. Indeed, President Abraham Lincoln, in his  proclamation  regarding the observance, called on all Americans to ask God to “commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife” and to “heal the wounds of the nation.”  We could surely stand to have some of that today.    Thanksgiving has been called a “uniquely American” holiday—and so, even in a year in which there has been what seems to be an unprecedented amount of disruption, frustration, stress, disco...