Nevin's Data "Points"

   If you read only the headlines from the latest Employee Benefit Research Institute Retirement Confidence Survey, the takeaway feels familiar: confidence is slipping, worries are rising, and concern about retirement readiness is once again in focus. Seriously? Look, once you move past the year-over-year decline [i] and look at the levels themselves, the picture changes shape. Yes, confidence is down from recent highs. But retirees, in particular, remain broadly confident in their ability to live comfortably in retirement despite all the “noise” about inflation, Social Security, and volatile markets. Roughly three-quarters still say they feel secure about their financial footing in retirement. That is not a fragile number. It is a resilient one. ad space What stands out even more is how consistently the survey shows a gap between expectations and actual experience. Workers — still on the near side of retirement — are meaningfully less confident than those already in it. That...

At a recent conference, our luncheon table got to talking about savings trends and the unique challenges of Millennials, specifically the impact of graduating with so much college debt. While several at the table had graduated with (and since paid off) college debt, the sums paled in comparison to the kinds of figures bandied about in recent headlines — or did, until I loaded up an online calculator that allowed us to see what our college debt at graduation amounted to in today’s dollars. To the collective astonishment of the retirement experts at that table, the totals, adjusted for inflation, were very much in line with the figures reported for today’s graduates. Factoring in those kinds of cost-of-living adjustments is, of course, a crucial aspect of retirement planning. Unlike Social Security, there is no annual cost-of-living “adjustment” for retirement savings—no systematic means by which those accumulated savings are increased to offset the increased costs of things like ...