Nevin's Data "Points"

   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...

   “ Larry Fink Knows Less About Retirement Than You’d Think an Investment Billionaire Would .” That’s the provocative title of a recent Substack column by Andrew Biggs, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. [i]  Not that Biggs offered a truly harsh criticism. Rather, he equated the comments of Larry Finks with that of “someone who reads the newspaper, the same as you or me.”  Of course, and as yours truly has commented on any number of occasions — and what Biggs calls out — is that “much of what you read about retirement in the newspaper or online or even in  so-called studies  just isn’t correct.” To put it mildly. In this recent column, Biggs offers a detailed account of what the actual data shows versus what Mr. Finks (and SO many others [ii] ) have held out as reality. Those with no retirement accounts don’t have retirement savings. Fink is quoted as saying that 57 million Americans “don’t have any savings or retirement plan.” Howe...

It’s ironic that programs designed to provide retirement income pay so little attention to the realization of that objective. That’s right—for the vast majority of participants today, creating that “paycheck for the rest of your life” remains a DIY undertaking. To this day only about half of defined contribution plans currently provide an option for participants to establish a systematic series of periodic payments, much less an annuity or other in-plan retirement income option.  However, the need for that solution is widely acknowledged—and there are some new, if somewhat familiar, solutions emerging.  Earlier this month, BlackRock garnered some  headlines  with news that not only was it building annuity contracts into a target-date fund series, but also that it had already lined up five large plan sponsors (with some $7.5 billion in assets) to implement the option as a default. That followed by a few months the March  announcement  of a c...