3 Pervasive Retirement Industry Myths

Ours is a complex and complicated business — constantly changing and evolving. And yet, there are key fallacies about today’s retirement system — and how it compares with what used to be — that will not go away.

Back in the good old days being “covered” by a pension plan meant you would actually get a full pension benefit.

We’re routinely told that “once upon a time” individuals used to work for a single employer their entire career, and that most of those workers were “covered by a workplace retirement plan, frequently a defined benefit pension.”

While defined benefit plans were certainly more common a generation ago, they were not as ubiquitous as is often assumed (see here).  

Moreover, while some workers did spend their working career at a single employer (and some still do, particularly in the public sector), the data show that for the very most part we have long been a nation of relatively short-tenured workers. How short? Well, the median job tenure in the United States — how long workers stay at one job — has hovered around five years for the past three decades. Indeed, according to the nonpartisan Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI), in recent years it has ticked up, to about 5.5 years, but that’s because women are staying in their jobs longer; job tenure for men has actually been dropping.

What that means is that even workers who were “covered” by a pension plan in the private sector weren’t working with that employer long enough to get much — or any — of that promised pension benefit.

Only half of American workers have access to a workplace retirement plan.

Speaking of coverage, this is one of those statements that, while technically accurate, is somewhat misleading. Applied to all workers, that is what the National Compensation Survey (conducted by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics) indicates. But it includes all workers, including very young, very low-income, part-time and part-year workers.

If you focus on full-time, full-year wage and salary workers ages 21-64, an analysis by the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) noted that in 2013, two-thirds of those workers — workers who might reasonably be expected to be covered by a voluntary workplace retirement plan under current law — did, in fact, work for an employer that sponsored a plan.

The average 401(k) balance tells us…anything.

Let’s say I told you that the average 401(k) balance in a survey sampling was $130,000 — would that be good or not?

What if I then told you that our sampling consisted of an individual who is 25 years old and has a 401(k) balance of $5,000, and an individual who is 64 years old and has a 401(k) balance of $255,000? How might that change your response? Would that tell you anything meaningful about the retirement readiness of that group?

Of course not — but surveys and coverage of those surveys routinely purport to glean a sense of retirement readiness from those kind of numbers. Despite the reality that they are comprised of savings totals for workers with a wide range of age, tenure, and savings rates — totals that are simply added together, and then divided by the number of workers in the sample.

The math on 401(k) averages is easy. The conclusions often drawn from that math, iffy. At best.

So, the next time you’re at an industry event and hear someone (who should know better) repeat one (or more) of those statements, or interviewed by a reporter who puts one (or more) of those presumptions forth as “proof” of the current system’s shortfalls, keep in mind that the data tells a different story.

And one that isn’t told often enough.

- Nevin E. Adams, JD

The "Hassle" Factor

Much is made these days of the application of behavioral finance and the implications for plan design, as well as the role of choice architecture in helping workers make “better” (if not more informed) benefit decisions.  Valuable as these insights have been, I think much of human behavior (or lack thereof) in these matters can be more simply explained.

What’s at work is a concept a friend of mine described to me more than 20 years ago – something he called “the hassle factor.”  It was a philosophy he routinely applied in many aspects of his personal and professional life.  Simply stated, presented with a choice between doing something that is hard, time-consuming, complicated, or even inconvenient, and doing something else, my friend – and, in fairness, human beings generally seem to be – inclined to opt for the latter.

Of course, the “hassle factor” CAN be trumped by exterior needs or forces, as anyone who has endured the long lines at the DMV or sat through the background music on an interminably long customer service line can attest.  That said, things like an unduly complicated 401(k) enrollment form/process can certainly serve as a barrier to plan entry, and there’s every reason to expect that the same might apply when it comes time to exit the plan.

Job change is a point in time at which a lot of important decisions are made—some voluntary and some forced upon us—and the disposition of one’s retirement savings account certainly looms large among them.  A recent EBRI Notes article examined what workers age 50 and above did with their defined contribution account balances at the point of job change, looking at data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a study of a nationally representative sample of U.S. households with individuals age 50 and over.  EBRI analyzed responses from 2008 and 2010 for this study.

In terms of demographic characteristics, no significant difference was found between men and women in terms of their DC account balances and what they chose to do with them at job change.  And while married or partnered individuals were less likely to withdraw their assets and more likely to roll them over into an IRA than singles, the differences were small.

The EBRI analysis did find that a decision to take a withdrawal in cash declined with higher account balances, higher incomes, existing ownership of an IRA, and higher financial wealth. Not surprisingly, the decision to cash out rose with individual debt levels.

However, among those who left their employer but remained in the workforce, the most common outcome was to leave their retirement account balance with their prior employer’s plan.  The EBRI report notes that, unlike the outcomes detailed above, there was no clear trend between the financial variables, and the decision to leave those DC balances in the prior employer plans.

As for what might explain that outcome, the report noted that it might simply be a decision to postpone taking the money until it was needed, or that there “may be behavioral factors, such as inertia, driving what might be seen as a ‘non-decision.’”

Or, as my friend might have been inclined to say, a non-decision based on the “hassle factor.”

• Nevin E. Adams, JD

“Take it or Leave it? The Disposition of DC Accounts: Who Rolls Over into an IRA? Who Leaves Money in the Plan and Who Withdraws Cash?” is published in the EBRI May Notes, available here.