September 2022

Financial Wellness Meets Behavioral Economics

By Shlomo Benartzi Helping Participants See the Big Picture and Act on It The financial lives of American workers have become increasingly complicated in the 21st century. Instead of relying on an employer pension, most workers now save on their own, a shift that brings both opportunities and challenges. In addition, workers have to effectively allocate these savings across different financial products and accounts. Should they fund their 401(k) account or emergency savings account? Should they choose a high-deductible health...

U.S. This is how much Social Security benefits are likely to rise next year

By Brett Arends Social Security beneficiaries could be looking at a very welcome bump of 8.7% in their benefits starting in January next year, if current trends continue. That hike would be the biggest since 1981, and would be worth an extra $144 a month for a retiree on the average monthly benefit of $1,656. These numbers are the latest projection from the Senior Citizens League, a nonprofit, and are based on the government’s inflation data over recent months. These are only projections,...

Are Retirement Planning Tools Substitutes or Complements to Financial Capability?

By Gopi Shah Goda, Matthew Levy, Colleen Flaherty Manchester, Aaron Sojourner, Joshua Tasoff, Jiusi Xiao We conducted a randomized controlled trial to understand how a web-based retirement saving calculator affects workers’ retirement-savings decisions. In both conditions, the calculator projected workers’ retirement income goal. In the treatment condition, it additionally projected retirement income based on defined-contribution savings, prominently displayed the gap between projected goal and actual retirement income, and allowed users to interactively explore how alternative, future contribution choices would affect...

August 2022

How this man went from unemployment to early retirement in the Caribbean

“I’m having the time of my life,” Mike Whalen beams, when I meet him at his restaurant in Ambergris Caye, Belize. “I’m still learning as I go, but what better place to do it than a tropical island? I live and work on ‘Coconut Drive’! How could I possibly have a single, solitary regret?” In July 2020, at the age of 51, Mike had reached a dire crossroads. He’d worked at AT&T in Oklahoma City for years, but after cutbacks...

April 2022

UK. One in five leaving retirement planning till aged 60

One in five people have said they would leave planning their retirement until they were aged at least 60, a survey by Hargreaves Lansdown has revealed. Hargreaves Lansdown warned that leaving retirement planning so late could be dangerous for savers, cautioning that the later planning is left the less time there is to make up any contribution shortfalls, which may limit choices. The client survey, which was carried out in January 2022 and consisted of 400 customers, also found that a...

August 2021

Here’s The Only Retirement Risk That Really Matters To You

Chances are at some point in your retirement saving (or spending) life you’ve been asked a question or two about your appetite for risk. For a while, back in the era of Modern Portfolio Theory, the whole concept of “risk” and the investor was the cat’s pajamas. In the old days they even had entire questionnaires designed to extract this information from you without you knowing it. That is until it became clear those little quizzes had about as much...

February 2017

Retirement Spending and Biological Age

By Huang Huaxiong, Moshe A. Milevsky & T. S. Salisbury (York University) Abstract:     We solve a retirement lifecycle model in which the consumer's age does not move in lockstep with calendar time. Instead, biological age increases at a stochastic non-linear rate in chronological age, which one can think of as working with a clock that occasionally moves backwards in time. Our paper is inspired by the growing body of medical literature that has identified biomarkers of aging which --...