Nevin's Data "Points"

Do plan sponsors really know what participants want? Back in the early 1990s, there was a very popular “self-help” book on relationships titled “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus.” The basic premise, of course, was that men and women have different means and styles of communication – that, in essence, they might as well be from different planets (hence the title). It suffers, as most such works do, from over-generalizing (to say the least – the hidden points system ostensibly maintained by each gender struck me as truly bizarre, even in the 1990s) – but it no doubt stimulated some relationship conversations, and if it opened some of those doors – well, that’s a good thing. The relationship between plan sponsors and participants isn’t generally fraught with the same layers of complexity, but every so often a survey comes out that makes me think otherwise. The latest was a report by American Century which surveyed (separately, but both during Q1 2019) 1,500 re...

When I was 16, my family moved from a small town in Southern Illinois to the suburbs of Chicago.   It was a move that was to change my life in ways I could not have even imagined at the time.   Had that move not occurred, I’d likely have wound up at a different university, might well have chosen a different major, and almost certainly would never have stumbled across the college internship doing pension accountings that has, many years later, brought me here today.   As you might expect, those possibilities were not obvious to me at the time of that move.   But looking back, the reality is that that move greatly expanded the life choices—and thus, the opportunities—available to me at a particularly critical point in my life. At EBRI’s Research Committee meeting this past week, Research Director Jack VanDerhei shared the updated findings of the EBRI Retirement Readiness Rating (RRR), which will be published later this month.   The Retirement Readiness Rat...