Sunday, June 21, 2015

What advice do you wish you had—or had not—gotten about your finances after graduating from college?

This is a slightly modified version of the blog I wrote for the Wall Street Journal, which is posted here: http://blogs.wsj.com/experts/2015/06/17/the-financial-advice-i-wish-i-had-gotten-at-graduation/

For everyone, the memories of life after college are a mix of excitement and trepidation about what is coming next. For me it was also a transition year, as I had some teaching and research assistant work while applying to graduate school. Realizing now how important a time that was to think about finances, my first wish would have been for some advice! As a major in economics, I knew about Edgeworth box and Pareto efficiency, but not much about how to manage my (little) money. My parents thought an education from the best private college in Italy would provide the skills a young person needed to navigate today’s economy, but they never checked.

The advice I wish I had received after graduating from college and graduate school is about the importance of planning for the future—for retirement, for buying a house and so on. I have always been a saver, even during the grueling low-income period in graduate school, but saving equated to what was left over each year without any specific target to achieve. It took me a while to figure out that my savings were either too little or not allocated properly.
Had I planned to buy a home, I would have been able to buy it sooner and a more suitable house as well. But an early start in saving for retirement is where I could have benefitted the most. My retirement is likely to be as long as my working career. I sincerely hope that is true and a lot of savings will be necessary to support those post-employment years—and that cannot be achieved by leaving things to chance.

In my case, three things were needed. First, I had to figure out how much to save in order to retire at a target date. That required calculations, not just relying on the gut feeling about saving I had used after college and graduate school. Second, I needed a proper allocation of those savings. It was inefficient to save without taking advantage of tax-favored vehicles, such as Supplementary Retirement Accounts and IRAs, or to invest in managed funds that generated dividends and charged high fees. Third, I needed a system to keep myself on track and to evaluate how well I was doing. Even though I came late to understanding these future-planning requirements, the changes are paying off. Empirically, it turns out that those who plan for retirement end up with about three times the wealth of those who do not plan.  

One of the keynote speakers at our financial literacy seminar series said that it is very hard to support a 30-year retirement with a 40-year working career. It will be even worse if retirement is extended (longevity keeps increasing) while the working years when one can contribute to retirement savings get shorter. The latter can happen because of graduate school, repaying student loans and the failure to think about contributing to a retirement account.
I now ask the following question to my students when discussing the importance of financial planning: Suppose you do no planning for your vacation, you just show up. What are the chances that you will have a good experience?

Thursday, June 11, 2015

Taking your pension as a lump sum? It comes with risks

This is the longer version of the blog I wrote for the Wall Street Journal, which is posted here: http://blogs.wsj.com/experts/2015/06/11/the-pension-payout-lump-sum-or-annuity/

As employers continue shifting pension responsibilities to workers, a new question has surfaced: Should employees take their pensions as annuities or lump sums? Workers with defined contribution pensions will have to decide this, and employees with defined benefit pensions are increasingly given this choice too, as firms try, for example, to reduce oversized plan liabilities.

Managing one’s pension can bring opportunities, but it also comes with risks. Indeed, the very reason for offering a lump sum is to transfer the risks from the pension plan sponsor to the individual. There are several issues to consider when such option is on the table.
Financial markets: An individual who opts for a lump sum must then manage that money. If investing in financial markets, the individual must decide how much risk to take. Even if the money is tucked under the mattress (figuratively), there is inflation risk—the risk that rising prices will dilute the money’s purchasing power.

Longevity: If a pension is taken as a lump sum, it still must last a lifetime. Individuals can buy annuities in the retail market, and there is a notion that there may be more and better choices in the market than what is offered by a single plan sponsor. However, as the January 2015 report of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) [Private Pensions/ Participants Need Better Information When Offered Lump Sums that Replace their Lifetime Benefits”] emphasized, retail market annuities are likely to be more expensive than group annuities.
Protection: The Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) established protection for pension plan participants and their beneficiaries. For example, ERISA set minimum funding standards for pension plans that are sponsored by private employers. And the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (also established by ERISA) acts as the insurer of private sector defined benefit pension plans by guaranteeing participants’ benefits up to a certain statutory limit. The protection ERISA offers to defined benefit pensions is lost when pensions are taken as a lump sum.

Whether to take a lump sum payment is not an easy decision. One of the greatest risks is perhaps the failure to understand the risks involved. When I testified about this issue before the ERISA Advisory Council on May 28, 2015, I discussed the empirical evidence we have about financial literacy and how little people know about risk and how to manage risk. This is why it is so important to provide not just information but also tools that make it easier for individuals to tackle this decision. One such tool is a calculator that shows how different interest rates and mortality tables translate into different lump sum payments.
Lump sum payments can sound attractive, and for some workers they may be better than annuities, but this is a serious decision that requires careful thought, clear planning and an understanding of how markets work

Monday, June 1, 2015

What information do participants need to make informed decisions in pension risk-transfer transactions?

This is an abridged version of my testimony before the ERISA Advisory Council. The full testimony is posted here: http://gflec.org/research/?type=policy-briefs

Thank you for inviting me to testify about information that participants need to make informed decisions in pension risk-transfer transactions. This is an important issue, and I am grateful for the opportunity to testify.  My name is Annamaria Lusardi and I am the Denit Trust Chair of Economics and Accountancy at the George Washington University School of Business and the founder and academic director of the Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center (GFLEC).

In my testimony, I would like to make four main points. First, this is a very important and timely issue. With the shift from defined benefit (DB) to defined contribution (DC) pensions, most of the risks regarding pensions have been shifted from employers and pension providers to pension participants. We have focused a lot on the accumulation of pension wealth versus the drawdown of that wealth, but what people do with their accumulated pension wealth is important and consequential. Moreover, as mentioned in the January 2015 Report of the General Accountability Office (GAO), even in traditional DB pensions, pension providers have offered participants the choice to take their pensions as a lump sum, thus shifting the responsibility for managing pension wealth after retirement and insuring for longevity and other risks to pension participants. As I have argued in many of my research papers, participants are ill-equipped to deal with this new responsibility, in particular when it comes to understanding and managing risk. The second point I would like to make has to do with the information that participants need when asked to choose to take their pension as a lump sum versus an annuity. While the information is listed and discussed in the GAO Report, it is also critically important to consider the ways that information is provided, particularly when faced with participants who display very low levels of financial literacy. Third, I would like to offer some suggestions on the provision of information, in particular about risk. Fourth, I would like to make some remarks on ways to improve the current retirement system so that participants are more empowered to make the decisions they now face and that are going to become even more important going forward.

The first point I would like to make with regard to the decisions that participants face when given the option to take their pension as a lump sum is that the level of financial literacy of most participants is very low. This fact is barely mentioned in the GAO Report but, in my view, is important. For more than ten years now I have documented that most individuals do not possess the knowledge of the fundamental concepts that form the basis for financial decision making, for example, knowledge of the workings of interest compounding or the effects of inflation. Moreover and most importantly for the topic of this testimony, individuals have the most difficulty grasping the concept of risk and understanding the workings of risk diversification. In my recent paper titled “Risk Literacy,” I document that people not just in the United States but also around the world display very little understanding of risk. This lack of “risk literacy” is particularly worrisome when we consider the choice between a lump sum or an annuity and the decisions involved in managing that lump sum.

The research on financial and risk literacy offers two additional findings for the topic under considerations. First, there are subgroups of the population that are particularly vulnerable when it comes to understanding risk and the workings of risk diversification; these subgroups are women and older adults. Women display much lower financial literacy than men. Moreover, when confronted with questions assessing knowledge of risk, women disproportionately tend to respond “I do not know” to the questions, a finding that is consistent in all surveys I have studied and that holds true across countries. The proportion of “do not know” responses is particularly sensitive to the way the questions—in particular the questions assessing risk—are framed. For example, questions that are heavy in economic and financial jargon elicit a very high share of “do not know” responses among women. Older adults, in particular those 60 and older, also display very low levels of financial and risk literacy. We do not know whether this is an age effect, due perhaps to a decline in cognitive abilities, or a cohort/generation effect due, for example, to the fact that older individuals lived in different economic circumstances and may not have been exposed to financial education in school and/or the workplace. Unfortunately, decisions about whether or not to annuitize wealth are made at older ages. Second, notwithstanding this severe lack of financial knowledge, when asked to assess their own financial literacy, most individuals (as many as 75%) gave themselves very high scores, well beyond what the scores resulting from the financial literacy questions would imply. The biggest mismatch between self-assessed and objective knowledge is found among older respondents; not only do they score lowest on the financial literacy questions (in comparison to other age groups), but they also give themselves the highest scores in terms of self-assessed knowledge. This mismatch could result in older individuals relying on their limited knowledge and skills and not asking for advice or consult advisors about managing their pension.

This brings me to my second point: it is unlikely that providing people with more information or the types of information that the GAO  Report found missing when participants were offered a choice between a lump sum and annuitized benefits is going to substantially enhance the choice that participants will make. Simply stated, most people can hardly do a 2% calculation, let alone understand how different interest rates and mortality tables will translate into different lump sums. The research I have mentioned provides instead three basic recommendations:
 
1)      The information has to be readily available and easily accessible as individuals are unlikely to even be looking for it. The GAO Report mentioned that participants had to actively look for information, and that it was often hard to find.

2)      The information has to be provided in very simple ways and in plain English; in other words, complex financial jargon has to be avoided as many individuals, in particular women, find it difficult to understand that type of information.

3)      Help has to be provided to conceptualize the information; for example participants may not understand that taking a lump sum means not just having access to and managing their pension but also taking up many risks, including the risk of outliving one’s resources. This help should include providing tools that makes it easy for people to do calculations or make comparisons.

This all may seem very daunting, and many have interpreted lack of financial literacy to mean that people should not be in charge of making complex financial decisions, but in fact our research also shows there are simple yet effective ways to provide information that help people in financial decision-making.

In my research, in collaboration with a group of co-authors I have designed short videos to explain, in very simple ways, concepts such as the power the interest compounding and the workings of inflation and risk diversification. Concepts are embedded into a simple narrative that highlights not simply what the concept means but also how to conceptualize it. For example, the video about risk explains the concept of risk diversification using the metaphor of not putting all of one’s eggs in a single basket to make clear what it means investing in just one asset or one’s own company stock. We have tested the effectiveness of these videos by assessing whether financial literacy and self-efficacy (i.e., confidence in making decisions) change when exposed to the videos. We divided our participants into several groups, those exposed to the videos, those exposed to a written narrative (rather than watching the video, participants had to read the story) and a control group who was not exposed to this information. We found that the videos increased financial knowledge and self-efficacy more effectively than did the print narrative. This study suggests there are ways to provide information that can be more useful and effective than the long list of documents and files that people are normally offered by pension providers.

The final point I would like to make is that the decisions that people have to make about their pensions are hard, and decisions about whether to take pensions as a lump sum or an annuity are particularly difficult. But people have to make these types of decisions and more so with defined contribution pension plans. Financial products that are similarly complex, such as reverse mortgages, are now available to consumers, and people are faced with the choice of whether or not to annuitize their housing wealth. Another important decision is when to start withdrawing Social Security benefits, a decision which requires the same skills needed to make a decision about taking a pension as a lump sum or an annuity. We need to do a better job equipping people to make these decisions. It is going to be hard to even provide information when financial illiteracy is so widespread. Building a robust pension system starts with adding financial literacy in school, so that individuals have at least basic financial knowledge. Without such a knowledge base, it is going to be very hard (and expensive) to help people make financial decisions. The workplace is another ideal place for providing financial education. In a world in which individuals are asked to take on the responsibility and risks connected with their own financial security, it is imperative that we find ways to equip them with the skills and the knowledge needed to make these important decisions.