It’s been nearly a decade since BlackRock closed a line of iShares target-date ETFs for which it had high hopes. At the time, the products, like other ETFs, had struggled to win a place in 401(k) plans. They attracted $310 million — an extremely modest figure for the world’s largest asset manager. But now the company is taking another stab at target-date ETFs, this week launching the only such series in the U.S. With that product line, the iShares LifePath Target Date ETF suite, BlackRock is employing a different tactic. Rather than focusing on 401(k) plans, it’s aiming the ETFs at investors w ..read more

The concept of retirement is changing, and many people preparing for it are realizing that they can’t fully quit their working lives as soon as they’d like. The reality is working longer or taking a gradual retirement, where part-time jobs help bridge financial gaps. The average age at which people in the U.S. would like to retire is 59.4, although the average age they feel they will actually retire is 66.8, according to results of a survey recently published by life insurance settlement company Coventry Direct. Expectations differ across the country, with Nevada residents saying they like to ..read more

The upward trend in life expectancy has been evident for many years and yet still millions of Americans do little to plan for the large chunk of their lives that will live in retirement. A survey from Western & Southern Financial Group is the latest to highlight a lack of professional planning – and therefore confidence – in retirement plans with inflation having added a new layer of concern. For pre-retirees, their greatest fears are running out of money (70%), health care costs (57%), inflation (54%) and Social Security cuts (49%) while those already retired rank Social Security cuts as ..read more

Medicare participants waiting to hear how much their premiums would increase next year learned their fate early this year. On Thursday, the more than 66 million people enrolled in Medicare were informed about their Medicare Part B premiums, which are usually deducted from Social Security benefits. Generally the adjustment announcement is made in mid- to late November, but it arrived a month early this year. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said the standard monthly premium for Medicare Part B enrollees will be $174.70 in 2024, an increase of $9.80 from $164.90 in 2023. The annu ..read more

Whether it’s money for something fun — like buying an RV to travel the country to see their children — or something painful — like replacing their roof — individuals often require emergency savings, but they tend not to think about it until they need it. “Most clients don’t see it as a concern until it’s too late,” said Cameron Valadez, partner at Planable Wealth. “We always recommend having an emergency fund, whether they need it or not.” If an emergency fund isn’t in place, clients often want to pull money from pretax retirement accounts, which can be costly. “They typically don’t think abou ..read more

The Social Security cost-of-living adjustment will be 3.2% in 2024, down from the massive boost of 8.75% implemented this year. The increase, which the Social Security Administration announced Thursday morning, is higher than the average of 2.6% seen over the past 20 years. But the decline in the COLA from 2023’s is a sign of cooling inflation. The rise amounts to an average increase of $50 a month for the 66 million people who receive Social Security, as well as the 7.5 million who get Supplemental Security Income, the administration said. “Social Security benefits are really only designed to ..read more

A new study shows Gen Z workers are itching to retire at age 61. If that’s the case, they have a lot of hurdles to clear. According to Charles Schwab’s annual nationwide survey of 401(k) plan participants released Thursday, Gen Z employees, or those who are 21 to 26 years old, want to retire at age 61, but 99% say they are facing obstacles to saving for a comfortable retirement, a 9% jump over last year and higher relative to the 88% of millennials, 91% of Gen Xers and 86% of boomers who cited such concerns. The top obstacles to meeting their retirement goals for Gen Z are inflation (54%), mee ..read more

PGIM, Prudential Financial’s investment management unit, said Tuesday that it’s lowering the fees on its target-date funds and collective investment trusts. The target-date series, the Prudential Day One Funds, has been renamed the PGIM Target Date Funds, and the funds’ net expense ratio will be cut to 0.25% from 0.40%. The expense ratio on the institutional share class of PGIM’s collective investment trusts will drop to 0.19% from 0.34%. PGIM also announced that it will adjust the funds’ underlying investments by replacing some actively managed equity strategies with passively managed strateg ..read more

To the extent that traditional pension plans aren’t all but a thing of the past in the private sector, they soon may be. Among companies that still have active defined-benefit plans on their books, 89% are planning to offload their pensions to insurance companies using a strategy called pension risk transfer, which puts workers and retirees into group annuities. That statistic comes from a recent survey commissioned by MetLife, which found that the companies planning to transfer their pension liabilities will do so within an average of about four years. Last year was a record for pension-risk ..read more

Millions of people are facing retirement without enough income to live comfortably and may struggle to address the issue. A proprietary model that looks at retirement readiness has been created by Vanguard for its inaugural retirement readiness report, in which it calculates rates of what it calls “sustainable replacement income,” the percentage of pre-retirement income that a worker can replace throughout retirement in 90% of market and mortality scenarios. It uses four key scenarios across three cohorts — early millennials (ages 37-41); mid-Generation X (ages 49-53); and late baby boomers (a ..read more