September 2026
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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14Aug

Saving for Old Age

By Asli Demirgüç-Kunt, Leora F. Klapper & Georgios A. Panos Countries around the world face a retirement crisis brought on by aging populations, declining birthrates, and fiscal shortfalls. As a result, policy makers increasingly seek to understand retirement savings patterns, a crucial component of the safety net for the elderly. Drawing on the 2014 Global Findex database, which provides individual-level data on the use of financial products in more than 140 countries, this paper examines how adults save for old...

August 14, 2026
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06Aug

Retirement Planning for Couples​​ Without Children

Key Takeaways for Couples Without Children Planning Retirement Consider a flexible withdrawal strategy. Align your portfolio with your goals. Make a long-term-care and estate plan. Plan ahead for aging in place. Consider working with a financial advisor. Valentina Djeljosevic: Hi, I’m Valentina Djeljosevic with Morningstar. Welcome to Retirement Planning for Real Life. In today’s episode, we’ll talk about couples who don’t have children, and how they might plan for retirement differently. Christine Benz will tell us about the key issues to keep in mind, like long-term care, estate planning, and...

August 6, 2026
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July 2026
28Jul

US. Policy Uncertainty Is Muddling Retirement Planning – and Advisors Are Just as Confused

Planning for retirement has always been hard, but when government policy is unpredictable, it makes it even more challenging. For example, changes to Social Security and Medicare can put basic security at risk; changes to the tax system can scramble a household’s finances; and ballooning government debt can increase interest rates and slow the economy. A 2025 survey conducted by Greenwald Research of 1,443 individuals ages 45-79 with over $100,000 in investable assets revealed that older Americans were keenly aware...

July 28, 2026
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24Jul

2026 Read on Retirement: A new era of retirement

By Black Rock When we look at confidence, we see savers who feel better about retirement than they have in years. But beneath that optimism, retirement income expectations and savings behavior tell a different story. And that gap is not experienced equally. Retirement challenges increasingly vary by generation and gender— revealing a retirement system that is becoming more individualized. Workplace savers increasingly know what they need to do, but competing financial priorities are making it harder to act. The challenge is less...

July 24, 2026
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