Ask yourself these questions:
Do you want a guaranteed retirement income stream as long as you live, to protect you against outliving your assets?
Are you nearing retirement?
Are you in a defined contribution pension – either an employer-sponsored 401(k) or 403(b) plan, or an individual Roth or regular IRA?
If the answer to any of these questions is “yes,” reading this post could save you money!…Read More
retirewell
A Proposal For Allowing State Pension Buyouts
Many U.S. state and local employee pensions are facing dire problems as massive plan liabilities come due, threatening to drain government coffers. As Robert Novy-Marx and Joshua Rauh wrote in the Journal of Finance, 21 state pensions held less than 40 percent of the assets needed to pay benefits. Their estimate of the aggregate “funding gap” faced by states was roughly $2.5 trillion in 2009. Since then, the story has not improved, and it has likely worsened. Puerto Rico recently joined Detroit as a case study of fiscal and public pension mismanagement and failure, and the Puerto Rican pension is essentially without any assets.…Read More
Retirement Income Calculators: Not Much Better Than Counting On Your Fingers?
When average Americans confront the complicated problem of how much to save for retirement, they often use so-called “rules of thumb,” or greatly-simplified approaches, to figure out how much to save and how to invest. It turns out that many of the computer programs created to help with retirement income planning do exactly the same thing: use rules of thumb.…Read More
Where Should You Live In Retirement?
I am often asked what are the most retirement-friendly places to live, so I assembled some thoughts in talking with John Kiernan from WalletHub.com.…Read More
Alpha Opportunities In A Sluggish Return Environment
The global economic environment presents new challenges for investors across the board. Public and private pension plans, consultants, Wall Street strategists, and money managers have all ratcheted down their forward-looking views on asset returns, meaning that defined contribution plan participants will be hurting if the financial community’s morose predictions bear fruit.…Read More
Improving Women’s Retirement Security
Older women confront many retirement security challenges. For one thing, women live longer than do men, so their money must stretch farther. For another, many average fewer years in the paid workforce and, when they do work, their average pay is often lower. Additionally, they are more likely to work part-time, for a lower salary. These factors all translate into lower retirement accumulations, smaller retirement payouts, and higher poverty rates in old age, as reported in a recent Society of Actuaries 2014 study “Impact of Retirement Risk on Women.”…Read More
Fixing The Weakest Link: Strengthening Retirement Security By Default
One drawback of defined contribution (DC) retirement plans is that they place the burden of making financial decisions on participants who are often ill equipped for the task. This has contributed to widespread concerns about retirement security. Will people have enough savings when they leave the workforce to afford a comfortable retirement? Will they then draw on their nest eggs efficiently while in retirement, enabling them to avoid financial ruin over an uncertain lifetime?…Read More
Target Date Funds: The Good, the Bad, and the Unknown
Target Date Funds, which automatically diversify, adjust and rebalance retirement saving allocations over very long periods of time, are among the most successful individual investing products of the past decade. Initially introduced in 1994, target date funds (TDFs) really took off after the U.S. Pension Protection Act of 2006 allowed defined contribution (DC) pension plans to use them as a default option for plan participants. Assets in TDFs rose from a total of $100 billion in assets in 2005 to over $700 billion in 2015, and more than 60% of new DC pension contributions are now flowing into these funds. At least 36 mutual fund companies offer TDFs to pension plans, and a growing part of the pension consulting business consists of helping pension plan sponsors to “customize” their TDFs.…Read More
How Financial Ignorance Can Ruin Retirement
There are compelling reasons to be worried about retirement preparedness. My work with Olivia S. Mitchell of Wharton’s Pension Research Council has found that only a minority of individuals gives any thought to retirement, even when people are only 10 to 15 years away from it. Planning can make the difference between security versus fragility in retirement. Our research shows that those who plan end up with double or triple the wealth of those who do not.…Read More
A New Approach To Timing Pension Payouts
US federal law requires retirees to annually withdraw a minimum amount from their retirement accounts after the age of 70 ½. [1] This is driven by a tax rationale: since pension contributions are generally tax-deferred, Required Minimum Distribution (RMD) rules require that taxes should be paid on pension benefits during old age. Yet a criticism has been levied at RMD rules, namely that they may prejudice good retirement policy. To the extent that some households are required to draw down their pension wealth too soon, this increases the risk that they will outlive their resources.…Read More