RetireSecure Blog

The Pension Research Council’s curated blog features insights from the industry’s leading professionals.
Views of our Guest Bloggers are theirs alone, and not of the Pension Research Council, the Wharton School, or the University of Pennsylvania.

Planning for Long-term Care Needs: Start Now

Few Americans do much to protect themselves against the cost of long term care (LTC) in later life.  In fact, between half and three-quarters of Americans are anticipated to need LTC at some point, yet only about 8 percent of the US population has LTC insurance. Instead, many people simply hope to deal with long-term care and other health risks when they happen. This is not a sensible way to deal with one of life’s major shocks, particularly when one could spend several years in such an institution at an annual cost of over $90,000.…Read More

Do People’s Longevity Expectations Shape Their Key Financial Decisions?

We have recently explored this question focusing on smokers, since smoking is widely confirmed to reduce human life spans. Our research reveals a stunning gap between objective life expectancy and how smokers think about their own life spans. To examine this point, we asked 963 in a representative sample in Israel whether they thought they would live as long as, less than, or longer than an average person.…Read More

Will Multiple Employer Plans Solve the Pension Coverage Gap?

Retirement legislation is one of the few areas where there currently appears to be bipartisan consensus in the US Congress. The SECURE Act, a comprehensive package covering numerous aspects of retirement saving, recently passed the House by a vote of 417-3 and it is expected to pass the Senate this year. One of the bill’s key provisions is to allow the creation of “open” Multiple Employer Plans (MEPs).…Read More

Generational Differences and Debt

Older Americans are carrying growing levels of debt into retirement. This topic was the main focus of the 2019 Pension Research Council symposium, and debt was also studied in a recent Society of Actuaries (SOA) study entitled “Financial Perspectives on Aging and Retirement Across the Generations.” Both efforts provide important insights into what people say about financial priorities and debt across generations, and both confirm that debt is important in retirement planning. …Read More

The Long and the Short of It: Financial Fragility in America

While Americans’ long-term financial security is essential, a target deserving of equal – if not more – attention has been overlooked, namely short-term financial security. A large number of U.S. households are financially fragile today, and their well-being as well as that of the entire economy rests on households’ capacity to deal with shocks.…Read More