Groundhog "Ways"

February 2 is the day upon which America turns its attention to Punxsutawney, PA (and what seems to be a rapidly expanding array of Punxsutawney Phil wannabes) to get a read on the duration of winter.

The theory, of course, is that if your local groundhog sees his (or her?) shadow when he/she emerges from his/her burrow, it will send him/her scurrying back inside, and with that action foretell six more weeks of winter, whereas no shadow portends a timely/early spring. However, like weather forecasters everywhere, Phil is often wrong in his predictions. Indeed, by some estimates (and going back to 1887) he’s only been right… 39% of the time (and since 1969, only about 36%[i]).

As complicated as it surely must be to accurately predict the end of winter, that at least is an event in the relatively near term. And one that (for Punxsutawney Prognostication, anyway) requires only the emergence from one’s burrow. Predicting retirement outcomes… well, that’s a whole other thing. 

Surveys routinely show that most Americans have not even tried to guess how much money they will need to live on in retirement, much less actually made an educated guess. In fact, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute/Greenwald & Associates’ 2020 Retirement Confidence Survey, just over 4 in 10 (44%) have (ever) estimated how much income they and your spouses would need each month in retirement. That’s a pretty consistent finding from the RCS, which began asking that question way back in 1993.

Worse—and this data point was not in the 2020 RCS—when you ask how people had made some kind of assessment of their retirement income needs, a jaw-droppingly large percentage indicated they… guessed.

Guessing might well be deemed a superior approach than ignoring the matter altogether, but consider that heading toward “retirement”[ii] with no idea of how much you might need is a bit like going on a long trip in an unfamiliar vehicle with a fuel gauge that isn’t working—oh, and with no real certainty as to exactly where you’re going, or when you need to get there. 

Many allow themselves the luxury of postponing this focus for another day—ignoring two harsh realities. The first is that time is (literally) money—the longer it’s put off, the steeper the financial “hole” to fill. Second—and one that ignores several harsh realities of its own—thinking that date of “retirement” will be of our choosing.[iii] If nothing else, the events of the past year should serve as a fresh reminder of that point (see also 6 Things People Get Wrong About Retirement).

Several years back, the RCS asked individuals how much they need to save each year from now until they retire so they can live comfortably in retirement. One out of five put that figure at between 20% and 29%, and nearly one-quarter (23%) cited a target of 30% or more. Those targets are larger than one might expect, and larger than the actual savings reported by RCS respondents would indicate.[iv]

All of which brings to mind this question: Were the savings projections so high because so many workers didn’t do a savings needs calculation—or did participants avoid doing a savings needs calculation because they thought the results would be too high?

Or both?

Let’s face it, if you’ve never tried to figure out how much you’ll need to live in retirement, you may not live very comfortably in retirement. 

And you don’t need to consult a Pennsylvania groundhog to know that could make for a really long retirement “winter.” 

- Nevin E. Adams, JD

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[i] Which still seems to put him ahead of most local weather forecasts.

[ii] And we are all, one way or another, even if you want to just think of it as a time post-employment.

[iii] Fewer than half of the retiree respondents to the RCS retired “about when” they had planned, and only 6% later than planned. Roughly half—and this has been true through the long life of the RCS—retired earlier than expected.  

[iv] And considerably larger than the record high savings numbers reported in the Plan Sponsor Council of America’s Annual Survey.

A Deja View on Retirement Policy?

One of my favorite movies — and perhaps my favorite “holiday” move — is Groundhog Day, the 1993 film starring Bill Murray as an arrogant weatherman who finds himself stuck in Punxsutawney, Penn. by a blizzard, who then discovers that he is also “stuck” reliving February 2 — over and over and over. A feeling, quite literally, of “déjà vu all over again.”

Murray’s character goes through some semblance of the five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance) as he comes to terms with his predicament, but even as he tries to break out of this cycle, he learns from his past experience(s) and modifies his behaviors accordingly; avoiding stepping in a deep puddle of slush, ducking an insurance salesman, and even carrying his own jack to help change a tire. Eventually, of course, all that “learning” pays off, though not without a lot of pain and frustration.

There was, in fact, something of a feeling of déjà vu in President Obama’s budget proposal yesterday, certainly with regard to workplace retirement plans. In addition to some new incentives around encouraging automatic enrollment and expanding access to part-time workers, making a return appearance was giving the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) the authority to set risk-based premium rates for pension plans and the administration’s proposal to mandate employer offering of “automatic” IRAs who do not already offer a workplace retirement plan, this time channeled to the myRA structure outlined a year ago.

The 2016 budget proposal also resurrects the notion of imposing a reduction on the value of itemized deductions to 28% — including retirement contributions, and the imposition of a retirement savings cap.

Arguably, these proposals stand little chance of making their way into reality. That said, the latter two proposals in particular are blunt policy instruments, and seem likely to reduce, not enhance, the nation’s retirement security prospects.

Consider that a year ago when the savings cap was introduced in the 2015 budget, projections by the nonpartisan Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) show that more than 1 in 10 current 401(k) participants are likely to hit the proposed cap sometime prior to age 65, even at the current, albeit historically low, discount rate of 4%. When you apply the higher discount rate assumptions closer to historical averages, the percentage of 401(k) participants likely to be affected by these proposed limits increases “substantially,” according to EBRI.

As for the itemized deduction cap, it would mean that those affected — likely those making the decisions on matching contributions of offering a plan in the first place — would pay taxes on contributions in the year the contributions are made, and then again at the full rate when contributions are distributed at retirement. How’s that for dis-incentivizing workplace retirement savings?

Indeed, perhaps the thing most troubling about the latter two proposals in particular is that they reveal a basic misunderstanding about the interrelationship between the incentives to employers to offer these programs, and the existence and expansion of these plans.

In sum, they don’t appear to understand that if you diminish the incentives to employers of participating in workplace retirement plans, you’ll likely see fewer retirement plans in the workplace.

So, while we’d like to think that those guiding retirement policy would learn from their mistakes, it looks like instead it’s déjà vu all over again.

- Nevin E. Adams, JD