March madness versus retirement planning
Posted on March 20th, 2008 – 5:08 PMBy Kara McGuire
The surveys on retirement pile up like an early-spring blizzard and are about as annoying. But they do what they’re designed to do: Get people to start thinking about retirement planning. The hope too, is that you’ll use their financial products and advisers to plan, of course.
The first is from Mass Mutual. The most interesting finding in their survey of 17,000 individuals:
More money saved does not equal more confidence. Only 44 percent
of high savers expressed confidence when making their investment
decisions, compared to 54 percent of low and medium savers.
What’s your number?
A lame ING survey (sorry ING, love the “high interest” savings account, but…) found that:
Americans view numbers relating to their sense of identity and their closest personal relationships as most important to them. The numbers frequently mentioned as significant are their own birthday (cited by 26% of respondents) or someone else’s birthday (22%). Other important numbers include a Social Security number (16%), a wedding anniversary (16%), a phone number (13%) and the number of children or siblings in one’s family (12%).
Only a small fraction (5%) consider a financial number, such as their retirement nest egg, as being among those most important to them. ING to the rescue.
The retirement game
The winner of the shameless attention grabbing non sequiter is Lincoln Financial, who did a survey that found 72 percent of Americans will spend less than one hour making their March Madness tourney picks this year compared to the 87 percent of respondents who plan to spend up to five hours in March thinking about retirement planning. I don’t buy it.
Who comes up with this stuff? And is it only so that their executives can make bad sports-money analogies (you know, crossing the finish line=retirement, get some skin in the game=start saving for retirement….)
