Nevin's Data "Points"

This may be the time of year when thoughts turn to stockings hung by the chimney with care, but it’s also the time of year when parents have to deal with assembling some of the things in those packages. And while Santa may have elves on staff to undertake the construction of a tricycle, dollhouse or Little Tykes airplane seesaw, in our house, that "elf" was named “Dad.” A painful lesson learned over those years was the importance of following the instructions. No matter how self-evident the process appeared at the outset, or how much I thought I remembered assembling something similar in the not-too-distant past, lurching ahead and tackling things in the order I thought made most sense was inevitably a formula for disaster. And then there was the year some miscreant had apparently “liberated” the assembly instructions from the package. Since it was Christmas Eve by the time I discovered this, all I had to go by was common sense and the picture of the finished product on the...

As a growing number of Americans near and enter retirement, concerns about the cost of post-retirement health care expenses loom larger.   In fact, worker confidence about their ability to pay for medical expenses after retirement was just half what they expressed about their ability to pay for basic retirement expenses (see EBRI’s2012 Retirement Confidence Survey ).   Little wonder, since a recent EBRI Issue Brief noted that health-related expenses are not only the second-largest component in the budget of older Americans, they are the only component which steadily increases with age (see “ Expenditure Patterns of Older Americans, 2001 ‒ 2009 ”).    Recognizing the potential financial impact, recent industry surveys have put a figure on the cost of post-retirement health care expense 1 —a figure above and beyond that of merely living in retirement.   EBRI has gone to great lengths to model the major risks to retirement income adequacy all the way back ...

I’ve been a huge “Star Trek” fan all the way back to when I had to watch the original episodes on a tiny black-and-white, 13-inch television set with rabbit ear antennas (and, yes, adorned with aluminium foil). Unlike most of my friends at the time, my favorite character was Mr. Spock, whose understated strength, brilliant mind, and quiet commitment to logic had an appeal to a young kid who fancied himself to have all those attributes (thankfully, my ears weren’t pointed). Perhaps as a result, early on, I mastered the “infamous” Vulcan salute that many people struggle to perform unassisted (it consists of raising your hand and spreading your fingers apart between the middle and ring finger), and the Vulcan greeting/blessing that accompanied the gesture—“Live long and prosper”—always struck me as being as elegant as it was simple. While we all hope to prosper and live long, a recent Issue Brief released by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College reminds us of the financia...