June 2023

The Role of IRAs in US Households’ Saving for Retirement, 2022

By Sarah Holden & Daniel Schrass This paper presents survey results on the incidence of individual retirement account (IRA) ownership in the United States and the contribution, rollover, and withdrawal activity of IRA-owning households. IRAs play an important role in US households’ retirement saving: In mid-2022, more than four in 10 US households owned IRAs. Traditional IRAs were the most common type of IRA owned (31 percent of US households), followed by Roth IRAs and employer-sponsored IRAs. IRA-owning households often...

Confronting aging: How LGBTQ+ seniors can tackle their special caregiving challenges

Margaret Roesch, 67, and her wife, Pat McAulay, 68, wanted to have a supportive community around them as they grew older. So they helped to create a cohousing development for LGBTQ+ seniors and allies, making it easier to offer support to one another. “We said we don’t want to have to go back in the closet when we get older,” Roesch said from the front porch of her home in Durham, North Carolina. Opened in 2020, the Village Hearth is a...

South Africa: ‘Two-Pot’ Retirement System to Kick in On 1 March 2024 – Here’s How It Will Work

The draft legislation governing the first phase of the proposed two-pot system has been published and is open for comment. The long-awaited draft legislation with more details regarding the roll-out of the "two-pot" retirement system was published on Friday afternoon. The changes are being introduced in response to consumers' dire financial stress during the Covid pandemic, when many were unable to access their retirement savings despite having no other money to turn to. The implementation date remains 1 March 2024, and the...

Robust Retirement Tiers Can Help Keep Participants In-Plan

Workplace retirement plans may need to change their name—these days, more plan sponsors are looking for ways to serve their former employees even after they’ve quit working. Research released by Cerulli Associates last month showed that more than half of plan sponsors (54%) would prefer to keep their retired participants’ assets in their plan, rather than seeing them rolled into an individual retirement account or other plan. That’s more than double the 26% who said the same in 2019. But plan...

May 2023

UK. Improving financial security in retirement

How much to put aside for retirement is one of those issues that many working age people do not like to think about very much. With the last seven years dominated by Brexit, dealing with a pandemic and recovery from it, supporting households and businesses with energy bills and the cost of living crisis, it is also fair to say retirement saving has not been front and centre in the mind of policymakers either. While there was a lot of policy...

UAE. ‘Shourak’, the new scheme by the GPSSA to provide more sustainable returns and secure retirement

WAM: The General Pension and Social Security Authority (GPSSA) has said that insured members under the GPSSA's umbrella who opt to join “Shourak” must do so within six months of their end-of-service date and merge their end-of-service benefits within one month when joining a new entity. “Shourak”, which means “preference” in English, aims to provide Emiratis with a more sustainable insurance return for themselves and their families and a secure pension scheme. The programme's procedures do not apply to employment years...

India’s pension scheme returns ‘exceedingly good’ versus benchmarks – regulator

India's national pension scheme offers "exceedingly good" returns of 9-12%, compared to most benchmarks, a top official at the pension fund regulator said on Tuesday. The National Pension Scheme, adopted in 2004, has recently come under criticism for inadequate returns, leading to a few state governments reverting to an earlier pension plan considered fiscally unviable. Following this, the federal government set up a committee to review the country's pension system. "The equity scheme, since inception, has given an annual return of close...

Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Annuities But Were Afraid To Ask

Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Annuities But Were Afraid To Ask If your well-rounded financial portfolio is a meal, then annuities should be part of the main course. Annuities are technically insurance products, but many people view them as investments—because, for all intents and purposes, they are treated similarly. There are many different types of annuities, but the main type is what people refer to as Lifetime Income Annuities, which work like a “Personalized Pension Plan.” These provide...

April 2023

PPG Industries unloads $309 million in U.S. pension liabilities

PPG Industries Inc., Pittsburgh, purchased a group annuity contract in March to transfer $309 million in U.S. pension plan liabilities to insurance companies. The chemical company disclosed the transaction in its 10-Q filing with the SEC on April 21. The filing did not disclose the number of insurers or their names. It is at least the third pension risk transfer transaction completed by the company in the past seven years. In 2016, PPG Industries purchased two group annuity contracts to transfer $1.6...

PensionBee. Annual Report and Financial Statements 2022

By PensionBee PensionBee is a leading online pension provider in the UK, with a mission to make pensions simple, so that everyone can look forward to a happy retirement. We are a direct-to-consumer financial technology company with approximately 183,000 Invested Customers and £3.0bn of Assets under Administration (‘AUA’) as at 31 December 2022 (2021: 117,000 Invested Customers and  £2.6bn of AUA). We deliver a leading customer proposition to pension holders in the UK defined contribution pensions market, catering for the mass...