Nevin's Data "Points"

  Last week, I shared   five of my Top 10 Pet Peeves   about the Retirement Industry. Here’s the rest of the list. Making “apples to oranges” comparisons of world pension systems. Let’s face it — nobody wants to be “average.” And yet, there are now a handful of retirement industry consultants that, each year, publish a ranking of how the world’s retirement systems rate — and year after year the United States generally comes in about the middle of the pack. Considering just how diverse these systems and the populations they serve are — one might well wonder at the need to rank them. But rank them they do, employing a relatively complex rating system to do so. The  most recent was by Mercer  — who, once again — held the U.S. in relatively poor esteem compared with the Netherlands, Iceland, Denmark and Israel. The Nordic countries are a perennial favorite here — though they all happen to be (much) smaller in population, and more culturally and racially monolithic t...

   Life is full of annoyances – all the better to appreciate the blessings that surround us. That said, there are things about the retirement industry that really bug me.  I recently had the privilege of being part of the Leafhouse National Retirement Symposium. The theme was unfiltered – the unvarnished truth.  And it seemed an appropriate forum to share some of the things about the retirement industry that really bug me.  Here’s the list: Using the average or median retirement balance as a proxy for retirement readiness. Generally speaking, retirement plans are comprised of a myriad of individual circumstances – participants of ages that run from late teens to beyond traditional retirement, savings behaviors based on income – and age – and company match… Not to mention that this might be only a half dozen years of a worker’s accumulation, with the rest on some other recordkeeping platform… Why any rational person would think that combining those disparate elem...

  It’s been said that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. But what if it’s a figment of your imagination? “Crisis” is a word much bandied about these days, most particularly as a label applied to retirement—by foes and fans alike. Indeed, while not so long ago headlines posed that premise as a question (“Is there a retirement crisis?”), it is now generally posited as a current reality (often accompanied by an exclamation point)—even though an examination of objective data (and a clinical application of the term “crisis” [i] ) suggests otherwise. To a certain extent, such hyperbole is understandable; “crisis” is, after all, one of those descriptors that cry out for swift and decisive action—and the industry of employee benefits has had its fair share. Let's be honest - claiming that we are in the middle of a crisis is most assuredly a better bet in terms of getting a book deal, a televised interview, or hundreds of thousands of “clicks.” And certainly over the course of my career...