Economic hardship 401(k) withdrawals to get easier from January 2020, which Wharton’s Olivia S. Mitchell thinks will boost popularity of 401(k) withdrawals over loans and help people avoid penalties from defaulting on those loans. Read here.
A financial transaction tax (FTT) is exactly what it sounds like: a tax imposed on the exchange of all or certain types of financial instruments. A well-known example of such a tax is the British stamp tax—a modern version of the tax that contributed to the American independence movement. Recently, several prominent presidential candidates, including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris, have called for such a tax……Read More
The Institute of Consumer Money Management recently announced a $2 million grant for studying the financial health of low and moderate income Americans near or in retirement. Prof. Mitchell, Dr. Robert Clark of North Carolina State University, and Dr. Annamaria Lusardi of George Washington University will be working together on…Read More
Oregon is leading the way expanding access to workplace retirement plans via its OregonSaves program. How has it affected participation and outcomes among eligible employees? A new paper entitled “Auto-Enrollment Retirement Plans for the People: Choices and Outcomes in OregonSaves,” by John Chalmers, Olivia S. Mitchell, Jonathan Reuter, Geoffrey Sanzenbacher…Read More
Nobody knows how long they’ll live, which makes bonds a more risky prospect for retirees’ long term planning. Benjamin Harris cites work by Vanya Horneff, Raimond Maurer and Wharton’s Olivia S. Mitchell showing the advantage of putting 10% of 401(k) wealth into deferred annuities instead.…Read More
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
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
Multiemployer pension plans in the United States are in dire financial straits. It’s estimated that the retirement plans of workers and retirees covered by these plans in the mining, retail trade, construction, transportation and other such sectors face a $54 billion shortfall today.…Read More
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
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
