Nevin's Data "Points"

   Your best laid plans can quickly go awry if your beneficiaries are clueless. For the past several months, I’ve been dealing with the disposition of my late mother’s estate. In the overall scheme of things, it is neither large, nor particularly complex. As I’ve noted before, Mom did a solid job of not only managing her finances while alive, but in terms of making sure that I (as eldest perhaps, but more specifically as executor) was aware of the various insurance policies, retirement accounts and property.  In that respect, she was doubtless “better” than many parents in discussing such matters before her passing (though none of that happened until after my father passed). Moreover, despite their modest means, they set up a living trust back when my Dad was with us — specifically to avoid the complexities of going through probate in an effort to make it easier for us. And prior to her passing, Mom made sure I had all the account numbers and phone numbers, and we set up ...

 A recent survey of insurers highlights the criteria that a number of the nation’s leading fiduciary liability insurers identified as the biggest sources of fiduciary risk—within the control of plan fiduciaries.  Now, arguably, the report—titled “ What Drives Fiduciary Liability? ”—might have been more accurately titled “What Drives Fiduciary Liability Insurance Costs?”—or even more precisely “What Drives Fiduciary Liability Insurance Costs That You Can Do Something About?” Indeed, the report’s authors note that it was specifically focused on sources of risk that are within the control of fiduciaries. That’s key, because there  are  things that attract litigation (such as plan size or even stock price) that aren’t.  Moreover, the survey respondents (there were 8 of the 12 that Aon said account for 85% of the total gross written premium placed by the firms in 2020) were asked only to evaluate pricing criteria as having a significant, small or nonex...

I recently upgraded the operating system on my iPhone. Not that that would normally be a big deal—I generally try to keep such things current, despite the occasional “bumps” that inevitably come with software upgrades. But this time the upgrade wasn’t just about improving performance and fixing issues that had been identified since the last update.  No, this one not only LOOKED different, some core functions were said to work differently—and “different” in this case appeared to be a problem for a number of users. So, before I took the “plunge,” I spent some time trying to do some research—trying to find out what kinds of improvements I could anticipate, and to better understand the complaints associated with an upgrade from which there was, apparently, no “return.” The upgrades were readily quantified (on the vendor’s website most notably), although I think it’s fair to say they had a motivation in promoting the new system. However, most seemed to be relatively unimportant in ter...