A digest of timely information
and insight about finance, investing, and retirement.
Two-thirds
of Colorado voters anxious about retirement | Denver Post
About two-thirds of Colorado registered
voters age 25 to 64 describe feeling anxious about having enough money to live
on in retirement, and more than half estimate they are behind schedule in their
retirement savings, according to a survey from AARP. Those personal concerns are translating into support by a
high margin, 70 percent, for a private-public partnership to offer workers a
retirement savings plan when their employers don’t provide one. Creating a
state-backed retirement plan option is under consideration again in the
legislature this year after past attempts failed.
The
retirement crisis is bad for everyone—especially these people | MarketWatch
The country is facing a retirement
crisis, but some Americans are worse off than others. Workers in the top 20
percent of earnings distributions have half of all retirement wealth in both
1992 and 2010, compared with the bottom group, which saw its share fall from 3
percent to 1 percent between those years, a recent analysis at The
New School’s Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis (SCEPA) found. The share of workers in the bottom
fifth of the earnings distribution with no retirement savings jumped from 45
percent to 51 percent in those 18 years.
What
you need to know about pension lump sums | Forbes
Recently, a news item appeared at CNN:
“It just became easier for employers
to dump retirees’ pensions.” The headline suggests
that employers are simply defaulting on their obligation to pay pension
benefits. The reality is that the Trump administration restored permission to
employers to offer to its retirees, in a time-limited window, the option to
convert their future lifelong annuity pension payments into a single lump sum
payment, a process that some employers had begun to implement but which the
Obama administration had prohibited in 2015.
How
behavioral technology will improve retirement planning |
InvestmentNews
Technology has always been the great disrupter. When robo-advisers came
around, traditional advisers began preparing for battle. Now financial advisers
are largely embracing technology, using it to free them up to be better advisers.
But technology isn’t done evolving. The technology today is most likely more of
a starting line than a finish line. So the question now is: How will the next
generation of financial planning tech look?
Retirement
planning: Learning from other people’s mistakes | The Street
Sorrowful tales of ruinous errors with retirement investments are all
too common. Just ask financial adviser Frank Pare. He knows how easy it is to
make financial mistakes with retirement money, whether out of ignorance or
emotional strain. Mishandling the intricacies of finance can lead to horrible
outcomes, he said. Plus, “Trying to make rational decisions under stress” can
bring disaster, he told The Street’s Retirement,
Taxes & Income Strategies Symposium, held recently in New York.
Help
from states desperately needed | Pensions &
Investments
Pensions & Investments Opinion: We have always
believed that what is best for beneficiaries of retirement plans, whether
defined benefit or defined contribution, is best for the financial services
industry. We have also believed that as many workers as possible should have
access to a retirement plan. This is important for the financial health of
retired workers, but it also contributes to the country’s financial well-being
by increasing the nation’s saving rate. For that reason, we have supported
state efforts to set up state-sponsored private-sector retirement programs. The
nation cannot continue to allow more than 35 percent of full-time
private-sector workers to go without a way to save for retirement in a
tax-advantaged, low-cost plan other than an individual retirement account.
AnnuityA type of financial contract in which a person pays a lump sum or a series of payments in exchange for a guaranteed stream of income for the rest of their life.Defined benefitAlso known as a pension, this is a type of pooled retirement plan in which the plan promises to pay a lifetime benefit to the employee at retirement. The plan manages investments on behalf of members, and the retirement benefit is based on factors such as age at retirement, years of employment and salary history.Defined contributionA type of individual retirement plan in which an employee saves a portion of each paycheck (along with a potential employer match) and invests that money. The employee’s retirement benefit is based on their account balance at retirement. A 401(k) is a type of defined contribution plan.
