September 2026
22Sep

UK. Gen Z faces retirement poverty risk at auto-enrolment with only 4 in 10 on track

Four in 10 Gen Z workers are on track for retirement poverty if they remain at auto-enrolment contribution levels, according to research from Penfold. The research found that younger people want to retire earlier and achieve greater financial freedom, but retirement saving can struggle to compete with more immediate financial priorities, with high housing costs and wider economic uncertainty are adding to these pressures. Younger workers are also prioritising accessible and flexible savings options such as cash savings and ISAs. According to...

September 22, 2026
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22Sep

US. Average Number of Retirement Plan Investment Options Growing

The average number of investment options in a retirement plan lineup has been increasing slowly over the last few years, according to data from PSCA’s Annual Survey. For years, the conversation was around reducing the number of options available so as to not overwhelm employees with too many choices which can lead to them not making a choice at all. The average number slowly decreased and then hovered at about 19 options for many years — about five years ago...

September 22, 2026
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18Sep

This South American Country Is Emerging as a Retirement and Digital Nomad Hot Spot—With $700 Rent and Easy Residency Rules

While retiring abroad to Europe has become popular, and even highly recommended, Paraguay is emerging as one of the best options for those seeking a new beginning in Latin America—whether its as a retiree or a remote worker. According to retirement and relocation platform International Living, the South American country is touted as a “potential next frontier for expats,” thanks to its low cost of living, low financial requirements for residency, affordable real estate, and tax incentives. “People are expanding...

September 18, 2026
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04Sep

Subjective Financial Literacy and Retirement Planning

By Weiqiang Tan & Jingbo Wu This research uses data from the National Financial Capability Study to investigate how subjective financial literacy (FL) influences retirement planning behaviors. Through a probit model, we establish that subjective FL have significant positive effects on three common retirement planning behaviors. When analyzing how subjective FL affects retirement planning, we find that retirement savings estimation partially mediates the relationship between subjective FL and the opening of retirement accounts. In addition, we find that the effect...

September 4, 2026
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04Sep

US. DC plan sponsors struggle to define retirement readiness: WTW

A recent survey of more than 550 US employers by WTW has exposed an uncomfortable truth at the centre of defined contribution plan governance: a large majority of plan sponsors have no formal definition of what retirement readiness means for their workforce. “You can't prove that your plan works if you haven't defined what working actually means,” said Chris West, senior managing director and DC strategy leader at WTW. “Employers are facing a retirement readiness gap and that pressure is...

September 4, 2026
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August 2026
28Aug

Optimal Investment for Retirement with Intergenerational Benchmarking

By Luke Servat & Antoon Pelsser Countries have demonstrated a tendency to switch their second pillar toward defined contribution plans, increasing the market-sensitivity of pensions. This can lead to large differences across generations within a pension fund, as otherwise similar cohorts may experience different market conditions during accumulation. In this paper, we investigate how each cohort should invest if the goal is to reduce the likelihood of unlucky generations, in the presence of equity, interest-rate and annuity-conversion risk. We do...

August 28, 2026
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25Aug

Gen Xers fret over the future of Social Security. “I will likely be working in retirement.”

Retirement is biting Generation X. Its oldest members will turn 62 next year, the earliest age at which people can claim Social Security benefits, with many Americans having too little saved to stop working even as the program faces its own funding crisis. Chris Branaman, 53, jokes that his retirement will be spent as a Walmart greeter. "That's my funny way of saying I will likely be working in retirement," said Branaman of Bay City, Michigan, who works in IT and...

August 25, 2026
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24Aug

The best time to think about your pension is before you need one

If you’re in your 20s or 30s, retirement may be the least urgent item on a long and expensive financial to-do list. Paying the rent or a mortgage comes first. There may be student loans or credit-card balances to pay off. You might be trying to build an emergency fund or save for a first home. Add higher grocery bills, and retirement can easily become a problem for your future self. That feeling is understandable. Canadians aged 25 to 44 have...

August 24, 2026
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21Aug

Lessons for Retirement Security from Well-Regulated Pensions

By Andrew G. Biggs The near disappearance of traditional defined benefit pensions is often treated as a loss for retirement security. This paper asks a different question: whether workers and employers value guaranteed pension benefits enough to bear their full economic cost. ERISA made private pensions more secure but also more expensive, after which traditional plans declined sharply. Meanwhile, workers with defined contribution accounts generally do not recreate DB features through higher saving, conservative portfolios, or annuitization. These patterns do...

August 21, 2026
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14Aug

Shadow Pensions: An Exploratory Field Study of Informal Old-Age Income Strategies Among Jakarta’s Unregistered Workforce

By Fajrin Andi Muhamad Pratama Indonesia's main old-age insurance program, BPJS Ketenagakerjaan, is built almost entirely around formal employment-yet three in five Indonesian workers are informal, and only a small fraction of them are ever enrolled. National statistics capture the size of that gap well; they say almost nothing about what people actually do instead. I spent three days in Jakarta interviewing market traders and ojek drivers to find out. The results were not quite what I expected going in....

August 14, 2026
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