May 2022
16May

Australia. Pensioners hit hard by living cost increases

Annual increases in living costs have continued to rise, with age pensioner households experiencing a annual spike of about five per cent in living costs, according to new Australian Bureau of Statistics [ABS] data. According to the ABS data, the annual increase in living costs to the March 2022 quarter for employee households (households whose principal source of income is from wages and salaries) was 3.8 per cent. However, the annual rise in living costs for age pensioner households (households whose...

May 16, 2022
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13May

Why a Zimbabwean firm offers pensions denominated in cows

Kelvin chamunorwa’s mother was a middle manager at a bank in Zimbabwe. She worked there for 25 years, steadily contributing to a pension. But horrendous inflation, which reached an annual rate of 231,000,000% in mid-2008, wiped out her savings. When she retired, her pension was so small it was barely worth collecting. So Mr Chamunorwa, an actuary trained in Britain, started a company, Nhaka Life Assurance, to sell inflation-proof pensions to Zimbabweans. The pensions are not denominated in Zimbabwe dollars,...

May 13, 2022
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12May

Impact of financial investment on the individual’s confidence of happy retirement life

By Yan-Leung Cheung, Billy S C Mak, Hao Shu & Weiqiang Tan The study examines the impact of financial investment on the individual’s confidence in happy retirement life using data from 735 respondents in the Bank Consortium Holding Limited (BCT) Public Opinion Survey on Retirement Happiness in 2017. The result shows that holding the investment portfolio with savings and risky assets is positively and significantly correlated with the individual’s confidence of happy retirement life, and this relationship is more pronounced...

May 12, 2022
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Do Pensions Reduce Debt?
12May

Do Pensions Reduce Debt?

By Wei Chen This paper estimates the causal impact of receiving pension payments on debt behavior among older adults, with a natural experiment around China's New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS), one of the world's largest social pension programs. Using a fuzzy difference in discontinuity research design and four waves of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Survey (CHARLS), I find that the introduction of the NRPS reduced debt among older adults, and increased their ability to shield themselves against shocks,...

May 12, 2022
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12May

Pensions: people on lower incomes can be confused and disadvantaged by defined contribution pensions

New research released finds defined contribution (DC) pension schemes, which do not automatically offer a secure, guaranteed income for life, can lead to poor outcomes for those on lower incomes. Since the introduction of ‘pension freedoms’ in 2015, the vast majority of consumers are opting against a guaranteed income, resulting in them facing significant threats to their retirement security. Researchers from the University of Birmingham, supported by abrdn Financial Fairness Trust, conducted in-depth interviews with DC pension consumers and gained...

May 12, 2022
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11May

Zimbabwe: Low Pensions Force Workers to Resist Retirement

Low pensions payouts by both private and public sectors to workers has forced many to shun retirement. Some workers have reportedly gone to the extent of misrepresenting their dates of birth to postpone retirement from the organisations they would have served. What makes it worse is that the ongoing hyperinflation and which is eating into incomes as well as very low remuneration by both private companies and the government. In some instances, workers who have reached pensionable age die at work due...

May 11, 2022
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06May

On the path to bigger income in the future – news in Latvia’s Pension Law

Too often than not residents in Latvia do not follow their pension, because in most cases the word pension is something they associate with the far future. Additionally, people sometimes do not understand how their pension is calculated. In reality, however, it is all simple – the future pension «grows» little by little every day. The pension amount depends on two main indexes: residents’ paid tax amount and how much the saved up money is able to earn residents...

May 6, 2022
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The LGBTQ+ Gap: Recent Estimates for Young Adults in the United States
05May

The LGBTQ+ Gap: Recent Estimates for Young Adults in the United States

By Marc Folch This article provides recent estimates of earnings and mental health for sexual and gender minority young adults in the United States. Using data from a nationally representative sample of bachelor’s degree recipients, I find a significant earnings and mental health gap between self-identified LGBTQ+ and comparable heterosexual cisgender graduates. On average, sexual and gender minorities experience 22% lower earnings ten years after graduation. About half of this gap can be attributed to LGBTQ+ graduates being less likely...

May 5, 2022
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April 2022
21Apr

US. Inflation is taking a big bite from retirees’ pension income

Most pensions, unlike Social Security payments, don’t offer a cost-of-living adjustment that keeps pace with the current inflation rate. State and local government pensions typically offer up to a 2% or 3% adjustment a year. Private-sector employers that still provide pensions, however, typically don’t offer a COLA at all. There may be a tension between enhancing a pension’s adjustment and maintaining the plan’s longer-term financial health. Inflation is taking a substantial bite from the income retirees get from pensions. Many...

April 21, 2022
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21Apr

UK. Workplace pension of £65,400 in public sector six times more than private average

The number of people saving in workplace pensions has risen slightly, with the average pension value standing at £65,400 in the public sector compared to just £10,300 in the private sector. Overall, 79% of eligible employees, or 22.6 million, were participating in a workplace pension in April 2021, up slightly from 78% in 2020, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The ONS said that the growth was partly explained by “increased public sector employment driven by the government's response...

April 21, 2022
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