June 2022

The Missing Middle. How Tax Incentives for Retirement Savings Leave Middle-Class Families Behind

By Tyler Bond and & Doonan Saving for retirement is one of the biggest financial challenges most working Americans will face. While the vast majority will participate in Social Security, most will have less than half of their income replaced by Social Security in retirement. Therefore, many workers also will need to save for retirement through other plans, such as an employer-provided defined benefit pension plan or 401(k) plan, or on their own through an Individual Retirement Account (IRA). Congress...

LGBT: Retirement Preparations Amid Social Progress

By AEGON LGBT: Retirement Preparations Amid Social Progress is a collaboration between Aegon Center for Longevity and Retirement, and nonprofits Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies® (US), and Instituto de Longevidade Mongeral Aegon (Brazil). The report focuses on the retirement aspirations and plans among the LGBT community, and highlights findings from LGBT survey respondents from nine of the 15 surveyed countries comprising the 6th Annual Aegon Retirement Readiness Survey. Many of the traditional patterns of family and working life, including the way...

Factors Influencing the Choice of Pension Distribution at Retirement

By Robert L. Clark & Olivia S. Mitchell One of the most important financial decisions that pension participants make concerns how they access their pension assets when they terminate employment with their plan sponsor. Their choices depend both on own preferences and the options offered by their retirement plan. This paper examines both past and future pension withdrawal choices for those with defined benefit and defined contribution pensions, separately. Our data are drawn from a set of pension distribution questions...

People in Germany retired earlier with slightly higher pensions in 2021

For years, the average retirement age in Germany has been increasing, but 2021 saw a little blip in the trend, with employees retiring a little earlier and with slightly higher pension benefits than in previous years. People retired earlier with higher pensions in 2021 On average, people working in Germany retired a little earlier last year and with slightly higher pensions, according to new figures from the Deutsche Rentenversicherung, which were made available to Bild. In total, 1,435 million employees retired in...

25% of Americans are delaying retirement due to inflation, survey finds

Americans’ finances are being squeezed as inflation pushes up prices on things such as rent, groceries and gasoline. As a result, one-quarter of Americans will have to delay their retirement, according to the BMO Real Financial Progress Index, a quarterly survey conducted between March 30 and April 25. Putting off retirement plans is mostly due to disrupted savings from increased prices, the survey found. Thirty-six percent of survey respondents have reduced their savings and 21% are putting away less for retirement...

May 2022

French pensions to be tied to inflation in July, labour minister says

French pensions are to be tied to inflation from this summer in an effort to increase retirees spending power, France’s labour minister Olivier Dussopt has said. “What we want is for this inflation indexation to be valid from July,” he told RTL on Tuesday (May 24). Inflation in France reached 4.8% year-on-year in April, and could rise to 5.4% in June, the national statistics bureau Insee states. “If we take into account an inflation of 4%, for example, for a pension of...

Why are LGBTQ+ investors different?

Why are LGBTQ+ investors different?

By Matthew Carter &  Paul Donovan The obvious question when writing about LGBTQ+ investment is why the LGBTQ+ community would need to invest differently from the cis-gendered heterosexual community? The answer is that full legal and social equality does not exist anywhere in the world. When different groups face different social or legal environments, they need to invest differently to deal with the challenges that they face. While the main concerns of investors are the same, regardless of gender or sexual...

UK. Annuities make slow comeback as retirees look for income certainty

After a decline in annuity sales following the pension freedoms, the market seems to have levelled off with purchases accounting for around 10 per cent of total market share, according to the Pensions Policy Institute. A PPI briefing note published yesterday (May 26) showed that the average pot size used for purchasing an annuity has risen to £71,000 from £37,000 in 2015. But in recent years, more pots under £10,000 have been used to buy these products. These small pots accounted...

Top-Income Adjustments and Official Statistics on Income Distribution: The Case of the UK

Top-Income Adjustments and Official Statistics on Income Distribution: The Case of the UK

By Stephen P. Jenkins UK official statistics on income distribution have incorporated top-income adjustments to household survey data since 1992. This article reviews the work undertaken by the Department for Work and Pensions and the Office for National Statistics, and the academic research that influenced them, and reflects on the lessons to learn from the UK experience. Source: SSRN 451 views

The Economic Well-Being of LGBT Adults in the U.S. in 2019

By CLEAR The Federal Reserve Board has conducted the Survey of Household Economic Decisionmaking (SHED) since 2013. In 2019, the survey included LGBTQ people by asking U.S. adults about their sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI), enabling for the first time the creation of a picture of the economic well-being of LGBT households using the SHED data. Analysis of the data shows that in 2019: • LGBT adults were more often struggling to get by. Fewer than two-thirds of LGBT adults reported...