Nevin's Data "Points"

I recently stumbled across an academic study that claimed to find a correlation between higher employer contribution rates and leakage. I will confess to a certain skepticism at that finding. There are, after all, a well-established series of things that contribute to leakage, broadly defined as distribution of retirement savings prior to retirement – but employer matching contributions – and certainly more generous matching contributions – have never been on that list. The study – innocuously titled “ Cashing Out Retirement Savings at Job Separation ” – spends most of its 20-odd pages talking about leakage, its impacts on retirement security, and some possible solutions.  That said, one needs read no further than the abstract of this paper to find its surprising conclusion regarding one such underlying cause; its authors “estimate that a 50% increase in employer/employee match rate increases leakage probability by 6.3% at job termination.” More specifically, “The ...

While I appreciate the convenience of gift cards, giving them always feels a bit lazy. As a recipient, however, I very much appreciate the flexibility and the freedom to buy, within the limits of the card, pretty much anything—sometimes things for which I wouldn’t even have thought to ask much less buy for myself. And, arguably, in at least a couple of cases, things I SHOULDN’T have bought, and probably wouldn’t have bought, if it hadn’t felt like “free” money. That very human inclination to spend our own money more judiciously than what we are given underpins the growing interest in consumer-directed health plans, such as the now decade-old health savings account (HSA), or its slightly older cousin, the health reimbursement arrangement, or HRA [i] . Both are designed to provide workers the ability to pay for health care-related expenses with funds drawn from the account – and yet, EBRI’s 2013 Consumer Engagement in Health Care Survey (CEHCS ) [ii] found evidence that adults with ...