Nevin's Data "Points"

Millennials have had a rough week of it, at least in the financial press. First there was a report that they had established asset allocations that mirrored that of their grandparents (the respondents apparently never heard of a target-date fund). Then a separate survey that indicated they (70% of them, anyway) were ashamed to ask their parents for financial advice (we’ll set aside for a minute whether that would have been a good source), and then the pièce de résistance was a report that painted a pretty bleak retirement picture for a generation that “entered the workforce around the Great Recession, which began in late 2007, and experienced a difficult economy early in their careers. Now, they are confronting pandemic-related setbacks while trying to manage work-life balance.”  Indeed, the only bright note for this group—identified as those born between 1981 and 1996 - was a report that said the retirement savings gap between genders in that demographic was a m...

I’ve learned two things about Millennials over the years: first, that there are few things they find more bothersome than having Boomers tell them  what they should be doing – and if there is anything more bothersome than the first, it’s being called “Millennials.” Setting that aside, I was recently asked to participate in a forum focused on the challenges to retirement savings faced by Millennials. That event, “The Millennial Perspective: An Intergenerational Discussion on Retirement Savings,” was sponsored by Women for a Secure Retirement (WISER), centered on the organization’s iOme Challenge to develop a comprehensive proposal to address the challenges Millennials face in saving for retirement. Of course, the definition of a Millennial has proven to be surprisingly elusive over time. But those in the forum were willing to accept the definition recently put forth by the Pew Research Center, that it would apply to those born between 1981 and 1996 – which, ...

You may have missed it, but there was a bit of a “twitter storm” regarding retirement last week. More specifically, a relatively innocuous post about how much a 30-year-old should have saved toward retirement got a lot of 35-year-olds stirred up. The CBSMarketwatch article  quoted Fidelity as saying that you should have a year’s worth of salary saved by the time you’re 30 – but the real point of controversy  appears to have been driven by the premise that by the time you’re 35, you were supposed to have twice your salary saved. 1 The point, of course, is that it’s easier if you start early. But honestly, devoting 15% of your pay to retirement savings at any age is a daunting prospect, much less at a point when college debt and the prospects of a mortgage, kids and setting aside money for the kids’ college savings loom large. If this is “easy,” imagine what hard looks like! I’ve been a consistent saver over my working career – never missed an opportunity to s...