A digest of timely information and insight about finance, investing, and retirement.

Two-thirds of Colorado voters anxious about retirement | Denver Post
About two-thirds of Colorado registered voters age 25 to 64 describe feeling anxious about having enough money to live on in retirement, and more than half estimate they are behind schedule in their retirement savings, according to a survey from AARP. Those personal concerns are translating into support by a high margin, 70 percent, for a private-public partnership to offer workers a retirement savings plan when their employers don’t provide one. Creating a state-backed retirement plan option is under consideration again in the legislature this year after past attempts failed.

The retirement crisis is bad for everyone—especially these people | MarketWatch
The country is facing a retirement crisis, but some Americans are worse off than others. Workers in the top 20 percent of earnings distributions have half of all retirement wealth in both 1992 and 2010, compared with the bottom group, which saw its share fall from 3 percent to 1 percent between those years, a recent analysis at The New School’s Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis (SCEPA) found. The share of workers in the bottom fifth of the earnings distribution with no retirement savings jumped from 45 percent to 51 percent in those 18 years.

What you need to know about pension lump sums | Forbes
Recently, a news item appeared at CNN: “It just became easier for employers to dump retirees’ pensions.” The headline suggests that employers are simply defaulting on their obligation to pay pension benefits. The reality is that the Trump administration restored permission to employers to offer to its retirees, in a time-limited window, the option to convert their future lifelong annuity pension payments into a single lump sum payment, a process that some employers had begun to implement but which the Obama administration had prohibited in 2015.

How behavioral technology will improve retirement planning | InvestmentNews
Technology has always been the great disrupter. When robo-advisers came around, traditional advisers began preparing for battle. Now financial advisers are largely embracing technology, using it to free them up to be better advisers. But technology isn’t done evolving. The technology today is most likely more of a starting line than a finish line. So the question now is: How will the next generation of financial planning tech look?

Retirementplanning: Learning from other people’s mistakes | The Street
Sorrowful tales of ruinous errors with retirement investments are all too common. Just ask financial adviser Frank Pare. He knows how easy it is to make financial mistakes with retirement money, whether out of ignorance or emotional strain. Mishandling the intricacies of finance can lead to horrible outcomes, he said. Plus, “Trying to make rational decisions under stress” can bring disaster, he told The Street’s Retirement, Taxes & Income Strategies Symposium, held recently in New York.

Helpfrom states desperately needed | Pensions &Investments
Pensions & Investments Opinion: We have always believed that what is best for beneficiaries of retirement plans, whether defined benefit or defined contribution, is best for the financial services industry. We have also believed that as many workers as possible should have access to a retirement plan. This is important for the financial health of retired workers, but it also contributes to the country’s financial well-being by increasing the nation’s saving rate. For that reason, we have supported state efforts to set up state-sponsored private-sector retirement programs. The nation cannot continue to allow more than 35 percent of full-time private-sector workers to go without a way to save for retirement in a tax-advantaged, low-cost plan other than an individual retirement account.