September 1, 2011

I keep bumping into Tim Maurer’s videos – he’s an active tweeter – and decided to share the fun. This Baltimore financial planner’s clients include a lot of 30-somethings, so he produced a series of humorous 90-second videos that knock down the barriers to understanding the basics of various personal finance topics.

With many people either returning from or heading out on vacation this week, he suggests in this video how to eliminate the anxiety around spending money on trips.

But a couple of Maurer’s funniest videos include “The Bias of Life Insurance Agents in 90 Seconds or Less” and “How to Spend $1 million at Starbucks in 90 Seconds or Less.” At a time of historically low mortgage interest rates, a new video may be of interest to pre-retirees: “Pay off the Mortgage in 90 Seconds or Less.” Learn More

August 25, 2011

A centuries-old trend of retiring at an earlier and earlier age has completely reversed, concluded a July report by the TIAA-CREF Institute.

In 1910, men didn’t retire until they were about 73 but that dropped to age 63 by the mid-1980s, the golden era for generous union- and employer-sponsored pension plans. Then the retirement age and labor force participation ages started heading back up, according to TIAA-CREF’s report, “Early Retirement: The Dawn of a New Era?” Women experienced a similar though less dramatic trend.

The report provided numerous explanations for this, including the demise of the mandatory retirement age for most American workers; the improved health of older Americans; and technology that has created options about when and where they work. Many retirees go from full-time work to part-time “bridge” jobs.

But what about the economic and cultural forces that have left baby boomers, myself included, financially unprepared for retirement? Delay for us isn’t a choice but a financial imperative. …Learn More

Field Work

August 23, 2011

Stockbrokers and financial advisors typically focus on the mechanics of investing – the dividend, the strategy, or past performance. When they do, investors often become overwhelmed by the conversation.

To break through that and improve their comfort level, investors should instead focus on the more important issue at hand: the credentials and character of the person peddling those investments, said Tamar Frankel, a law professor at Boston University.

“I want to shift the focus from what is being sold to who sells it,” she said.

An expert in financial regulation and fiduciary law, Frankel’s latest research examines the role of trust in various professional relationships, including the relationship between a broker or advisor and his or her client or potential client.

Frankel’s basic premise is that no question is a stupid question. Since brokers and investment advisors are not regulated by the same fiduciary standards that govern, say, employer pension funds, investors must protect themselves.

That can be difficult to do when the broker is throwing around unfamiliar terms. She recommends investors come armed – with questions – to their meetings with brokers. She has put together a deceptively simple list of questions. If the broker refuses to answer a question – his or her right – then the investor has already learned something important.

Here are three of Frankel’s 15 questions and her thinking behind them.

Question: “Are you a registered investment advisor, registered broker dealer, or both?”

Rationale: Frankel’s message here is: assume nothing. Investors should be certain that the investment advisors or brokers being considered meet the professional standards established by their own profession. Even better, check out their credentials beforehand but ask the question anyway. …
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August 16, 2011

All the headlines about “financially illiterate” Americans miss something important. The language financial professionals use can be incomprehensible.

In this humorous video, David Saylor, whose job is basically “word consultant” for Invesco Van Kampen Consulting, walked around downtown Chicago and asked people to define industry terms such as “dollar-cost averaging” and “beta.”

One person got one answer right. (After watching the video, readers may need to consult Saylor’s glossary, below.) Even a seemingly simple concept – “transparent fees” – was misinterpreted. It means that fees are fully disclosed but was interpreted to mean “invisible.”

No wonder people are confused by the “Finglish” – financial English – thrown around by their mutual-fund companies, 401(k) managers, and other investment professionals, Saylor said.

His work also explores the subtle distinctions people make when the industry attempts to use familiar terms, such as “guarantee” or “nest egg.” …

NWNE Heard On The Street from Center for Retirement Research on Vimeo.

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Research

August 11, 2011

With the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index down 13 percent in three weeks, new research confirms what many people believe to be true: emotions drive investment decisions that can lead to costly mistakes.

In a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Market Research, three business professors were able to show for the first time that an investor’s prior experience with buying and selling a company’s stock – not cold, hard analysis – is what determines whether he or she would repurchase that same stock at a later date. When the entire market plunges hundreds of points, as it has this week, the tendency to be led by one’s emotions is only magnified.

Money-losing stocks are “associated with disappointment and regret,” the researchers wrote. “Simple reinforcement learning deters them from repeating the behavior that previously caused pain.”

Their paper, “Once Burned, Twice Shy,” adds to a growing literature that attempts to clarify the psychology of financial behavior. It’s a twist on one classic study that determined that people feel the pain of financial losses – or “regret” – far more acutely than they feel the joy of gains. Other studies have firmly established that investors more often sell winning stocks than losing stocks. … Learn More

August 2, 2011

Not all financial calculators are created equal.

That’s what Fidelity Investments hopes baby boomers will conclude about its “Income Strategy Evaluator,” which may be the first online calculator that proposes how individuals should invest their nest egg to ensure it will last through retirement.

There are numerous calculators online to help working individuals tally how much money they will need to accumulate for their retirement, including “Target Your Retirement,” which was created by Boston College’s Financial Security Project, this blog’s host.

But the strategy for withdrawing from that nest egg during retirement “is very different than the accumulation discussion,” said Chris McDermott, Fidelity’s senior vice president of financial planning. That discussion requires individuals to answer the questions, “What do you want and how much can you get out of your assets?” …Learn More

Field Work

July 28, 2011

The popular strategy of automatically enrolling people in savings plans didn’t work so well among low-income people.

Researchers found that when a tax preparation service slated 10 percent of filers’ tax refunds to purchase a savings bond, many balked and opted out of the program. The likely reason: they already had plans for how they were going to spend the windfall, including a pressing need to pay bills.

Automatic enrollment in 401(k)s, a strategy pioneered by behavioral economists, is gaining popularity in U.S. workplaces, largely because it works so well: a record 51 percent of U.S. employers used auto enrollment in 2010, according to Callan Associates, a benefits consultant.

Workers can still opt out, but employers have found that most of them remained in the 401(k) plan. This is due to inertia and also because employees know that saving for retirement is the right thing to do – they just needed a push.

But an experiment by economists at Swarthmore College and the University of Virginia, published recently by the National Bureau of Economic Research, “raises questions about the power of defaults.” …Learn More