Nevin's Data "Points"

   I recently did a roundup of some of the most significant retirement-related events of 2025. Then Jack VanDerhei, PhD fed that column through ChatGPT applying the style that famed humorist Dave Barry takes with HIS annual Year-in-Review. The result follows... Enjoy! The Year in Retirement Plans: 2025 By someone who survived it and would like credit By almost any measure, 2025 was a remarkable year for retirement plans, largely because it managed to be historically consequential without passing a single massive, system-rewriting law. This is unusual in the same way it is unusual when your roof collapses even though no meteor hit it. There was no SECURE Act sequel. No Pension Protection Act reboot. Congress flirted with something called the One Big Beautiful Bill , then decided retirement plans should sit this one out, possibly because they were tired. Instead, 2025 delivered something far more subtle and far more exhausting: implementation problems, interpretive confu...

Thanksgiving has been called a “uniquely American” holiday, and though that is perhaps something of an overstatement, it is unquestionably a special holiday, and one on which it seems appropriate to reflect on all for which we should be thankful. Here’s my list for 2017: I am thankful that – for the moment, anyway – it looks as though retirement savings will be largely spared tax reform’s ravages (though I’m not convinced that we’re out of the woods – yet).  I’m thankful that participants, by and large, continue to hang in there with their commitment to retirement savings, despite lingering economic uncertainty and competing financial priorities, such as rising health care costs and college debt. I’m thankful for the strong savings and investment behaviors emerging among younger workers – and for the innovations in plan design and employer support that foster them. I’m thankful that, as powerful as those mechanisms are in encouraging positive savings behavior, we con...