Monthly Archives: November 2017

How Group Annuities can help employers protect Defined Benefit pensions

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Source: Mercer Pension Health Index published October 2, 2017

By Brent Simmons, Sun Life Financial

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

Recently, employees and retirees of Sears were stunned to learn they may not receive all of their defined benefit (DB) pension when it declared bankruptcy. They learned their pension plan was underfunded and the company had requested that it be allowed to stop making the contributions required by Ontario laws. The plight of Sears employees and retirees has left many Canadians wondering if their DB pension plan is healthy and if their DB pension is safe.

The pension challenge

With a DB pension plan, a company promises their employees a pension for life and is responsible for paying the pension: whatever the cost ends up being. The problem is that low interest rates and choppy equity markets have made the funding level of many pension plans look like a roller roaster ride. This can be seen in the chart at the top of this blog.

Another challenge facing pension plans is that Canadians are living longer, meaning that pensions need to be paid for a longer time. A common rule of thumb is that one year of additional life expectancy at age 65 can increase the cost of the pension plan by 3% to 4%.

In a tough economy, the need to contribute to a pension plan can often come at a time when a company’s core business is also facing financial difficulties. If a company becomes bankrupt, then the company likely won’t be able to pay the contributions owed to the pension plan and employees may indeed face a shortfall in its pensions.

How Group Annuities protect their employees’ pensions 

The good news is that a growing number of Canadian companies are taking steps to protect their employees’ pensions. They are buying group annuities to transfer the financial risk of their pension plans to insurance companies, which are subject to strict regulations and must have funds on hand at all times to pay promised pensions. With a group annuity, an insurer assumes responsibility for providing the pensions to a company’s retirees in exchange for a fee, and the retirees continue to receive their promised pension.

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How Millennials’ financial priorities differ from previous generations

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By Gabby Revel

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

There is some truth and some fiction to the idea that millennials are not responsible with their finances. On the one hand, today’s youth is particularly adept at saving money and meeting their financial responsibilities on a monthly basis. However, millennials appear to have less foresight, as they’re not as interested in planning for their financial future as Generation Xers and Baby Boomers were.

Financial freedom

The most important element of a paycheck for millennials is the financial freedom it offers them. A study by Bank of America and Merrill Edge discovered that this generation is better at saving money compared to other generations, but what they choose to spend this money on differs greatly from older workers.

This same study discovered that 63% of millennials value financial freedom above all, meaning they set aside a certain amount of money to continue living their lifestyle of choice. This means planning for social trips or vacations, eating out at fancy brunch restaurants on Sundays and using Uber as one of their primary forms of transportation.

A survey by BMO Wealth Management found that 26% of millennials  —  ages 18 to 34 — believe “saving more” is their most important priority with finances. A further 25% value reducing and eliminating debt at the top of their list, while 20% want to invest effectively, 17% focus on budgeting and 5% believe in spending on personal needs or goals above all. All in all, millennials are reinventing the wheel in regards to where their finances should go, but they might pay the price moving forward.

Disregard for retirement

 A chunk of today’s youth has yet to begin planning for retirement, as they’re not thinking about what their needs will be in the future. Some believe Social Security (or in Canada CPP/OAS) will get them through their golden years, which only nets the average retiree about $1,300 per month nowadays. Others buy into the carpe diem or YOLO mentality that’s been instilled within millennials.

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“I’m nearing Retirement and the stock market is at an all-time high. What should I do?”

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On October 19 Fortune published an article with the headline:

“30 Years after Black Monday, the Dow Hits an All-Time High”. 

The article goes on to speculate:

“only time will tell if we have another crash ahead of us. But in the meantime, investors seem to think that skepticism and caution may be just what we need to avoid one.”

Connecting the all-time high to the Black Monday crash from over 30 years ago smacks of the kind of fear-driven nonsense that characterizes much of financial markets journalism these days.  The article raises the temperature further by pointing out that:

“this marks the fourth thousand-point milestone for the Dow this year, painting a very different picture than what was seen in 1987.  According to the Wall Street Journal, the Dow had never before hit more than two of these milestones in a year.”

Transforming meaningless data points into blood-pressure-raising insights is a coveted skill for both market journalists and stock market analysts alike.  After all it’s their jobs to get people to act: stock analysts to compel trades, journalists to direct readers/viewers to the skilled money managers that advertise in their pages or on their programs.

I’d be a poor headline writer.  The first one I came up with, “Dow Hits an All-Time High more than 500 Times Since 1987 Crash” wouldn’t inspire much fear or anything else.  The fact is that markets go up most of the time as is clearly displayed in the index data series shown at the top of this blog,  courtesy of Dimensional Fund Advisors. Continue Reading…

Sun has set on the Golden Days of DB pensions: How to survive the New Retirement

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My latest Financial Post column can be found online, by clicking on the highlighted headline: Sun has set on the Golden Days: How to survive the ‘New’ Retirement. It can also be found on page B8 of the Friday paper under the headline Senior Investing Gets Critical.

The piece is based on a half-day conference held in Toronto on Wednesday sponsored by Franklin Templeton Investments. The third annual Retirement Innovation Summit was an equal mix of sessions on Retirement readiness and updates by Franklin Templeton executives on the current state of the markets.

The big theme was the well-established (two decades now) shift from the guaranteed-for-life Defined Benefit pensions earlier generations enjoyed, to market-variable alternatives like Defined Contribution pensions. As a result, longevity risk and market risk has been gradually shifting from the shoulders of employers to those of their workers/employees. And that in turn has meant that would-be retirees have to devote a lot more attention to the markets and investing than older generations that enjoyed what seems in retrospect to be a “golden age” of retirement income security.

Retirement is a gradual process, not a cliff

As for Retirement Readiness, one speaker described how Retirement itself has become more tentative. Instead of moving abruptly from 100% work mode to 100% leisure the moment you reach the traditional retirement age of 65, workers are experimenting with retirement and more often than not returning to the workforce, only to rinse and repeat.

Since the US financial crisis, the numbers of people aged 65 or more who are still working full-time has been on the rise. Of those still working after 65, only one in five did so because they felt they had to because of shaky personal finances. For the other four in five, it’s “because they want to or truth to tell, their spouse wants them out of the house,” the speaker said.

Furthermore, among both full- and part-time workers in that age category, 40% reported they had retired twice already: they had quit the working world, returned a few months or years later, then quit again and then returned to work again.”

Taking a Retirement Victory Lap

So much for the so-called “Retirement Cliff.” This of course is a major theme of the book I co-authored with Mike Drak: Victory Lap Retirement. We basically argue that retirement is a long process that involves slowly moving into. After all, you never see an airplane land by suddenly putting on the brakes in mid-air and dropping vertically: there is a gradual “glide path” to a smooth landing.

So it is with Retirement in our view: call it Semi-Retirement or an encore career or a legacy career but in essence it’s about moving gradually over five or ten years from 100% full-time work to perhaps 80%, 50%, 30% and so on, so that by the time you’re fully retired (perhaps in your 70s), the shock to your system is much less severe.

 

10 ways to spot investment opportunities before the herd piles in

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By Dakota Findley

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

If you learn how to spot investment opportunities early, you could significantly increase the profits you make. Fortunately, doing this isn’t as hard as many people believe. Here are the ten essential components of spotting investment opportunities before everyone else jumps on the bandwagon.

1.) Find a Problem Solver

In 2009, Professor Raffi Amit of the University of Wisconsin noted that “Customers don’t buy technology. Customers buy products that add value.” These two sentences are vital to understanding which investment opportunities are worth pursuing.

An effective problem-solver is a company that:

  • Has identified one or more problems that a potential market is experiencing,
  • Has a plan, product, or service designed to address that problem, and
  • Can implement their solution in a scalable and cost-effective manner

In other words, you’re not just looking for companies to invest in: you’re looking for businesses that will be selling what customers are looking for.

2.) Learn to Understand the Criteria for an Investment’s Success

A 2011 study found that firms receiving angel investments (capital provided mainly for business startups) were about 25% more likely to survive for at least four years than companies that did not receive such funding.

The reason this fact matters is that a good early investment is one that gets enough funding to succeed. If your investment isn’t sufficient to help an opportunity succeed and nobody else is buying in, then it doesn’t matter how good their ideas are.

3.) Assess Your Risk Tolerance

How much risk are you willing to take on? We’ll be blunt with you: many early investments fail. Perhaps they didn’t get enough funding to succeed, or they suffered from poor management by people who were good at making products but not so good at running a company.

Whatever the reasons for failures, though, you’ll need to learn how to ass                                ess both how risky a given investment is and how much you can afford to lose.

As a good rule of thumb, you should never invest more than you could safely afford to lose.

4.) Practice Patience

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