Nevin's Data "Points"

 There’s nothing like a global pandemic to fuel interest in, if not the need for, emergency savings. Indeed, there are a half dozen provisions [i] in the new SECURE 2.0 designed to make it easier for workers to tap into their retirement savings—two aimed specifically at emergency savings. Though the financial impact of the pandemic (not to mention a series of natural disasters) has arguably been uneven, a report from Vanguard [ii] highlighted the longer-term impacts of the economic slowdown and inflation’s growing bite of the household budget. It's also widely acknowledged that concerns about the inability to fund an unexpected financial emergency is a source of stress for workers, undermining financial wellness.    All that said, well before COVID-19, there have been concerns about Americans’ lack of emergency savings [iii] and, perhaps more broadly, that they were using their retirement savings accounts as that resource. Behavioral finance-types have ...

Thanks to their mother, my kids have grown up with a variety of pets in our house—but none more bizarre than our experience with… a chicken. My son’s elementary school class had been exposed to the miracle of life over the course of several weeks by watching a set of chicks spring forth from eggs that had been carefully tended by the class. Once hatched and ready to be turned loose, the teacher offered to let selected children take one home—provided they obtained their parent’s permission, of course. My son was smart enough to ask his mother—who, seeing how much it meant to him—and much to my amazement, acquiesced to the request.  And so “Grr” [i]  entered our lives. Mind you, we were living in a residential neighborhood in Connecticut at the time, miles and miles from anything remotely resembling a farm. That said, the little peeping chick was adorable, and my wife persuaded me that, as the chick grew we’d be able to erect a small pen in the back yard. We even...