Kerry's notebook: Larry Fink wants your 401(k), investors are squeamish, what's Social Security hiding?
Every week or so, I bank some personal finance nuggets that don't make it into my Yahoo Finance columns. So now — and in weeks to come — I'll be clearing out my notebook. Here we go:
Private equity comes to your 401(k)? BlackRock (BLK) announced this week that it's launching a target-date fund that will consist of private credit, private equity, and other investments, aiming to increase the annual return an extra 0.5% — and roughly 15% more money in your 401(k) over a 40-year lifecycle of a target date solution.
The fund will be offered by Great Gray Trust, which offers retirement investment options and manages over $210 billion in assets. Empower, the second-largest retirement services provider in the US, has aligned with top-tier private investment fund managers and custodians, including Apollo Global Management (APO), Yahoo Finance's owner, and Goldman Sachs (GS).
BlackRock Chief Executive Officer Larry Fink proposed this idea a few months ago. Instead of a traditional 60/40 split between stocks and bonds, he wants everyday investors to branch out and diversify into private market assets. 'The future standard portfolio may look more like 50/30/20 — stocks, bonds, and private assets like real estate, infrastructure, and private credit,' Fink wrote in his annual letter to clients in April.
Sounds good on the surface, but there's a big red flag in all this: more risk. That's a big concern for me and many experts I spoke with this week. There are trade-offs. These investments are riskier than the run-of-the-mill index funds most target-date retirement funds hold, have higher fees, and are less liquid. That makes it a scramble to pull funds out if the markets drop, so a long investment horizon is critical.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission's Office of the Investor Advocate announced this week that it will look into the use of private equity and other alternative investments in retirement accounts.
Shuttering the blinds. Social Security has gone dark on reporting its processing times for benefits and help on its website. The SSA took down six webpages that contained a collection of performance statistics about live phone and claims data around June 6, according to a memo written by researchers with the Strategic Organizing Center, a nonprofit labor alliance, provided to Yahoo Finance.
For 10 days, the page was offline. If you went to the site, it read: 'Under Maintenance. This section is currently being improved. Sorry for the inconvenience.' The page remained offline until the SSA put up an altered page on June 16th. Most previous statistics and charts were deleted, and all data was consolidated into a single page with three sections.
That new page offers a, shall we say, streamlined view of the agency's customer service performance.
I will boil this down for you. The main message for seniors is — don't come see us. 'Very few services require you to visit a field office,' according to the website. 'We encourage you to go online to reduce your wait time and avoid a trip to the office.'
Well, that's easier said than done for older Americans who don't have access to internet services or lack computer skills. A note on the site says that the average time to wait for a field office appointment after contacting the agency is 34 days. Phone help can require a three-hour wait time or more.
But hold on. Wait time to access online services — 0 minutes is shown at the top of the page.
Also: The page does not provide the Social Security 800 number. Not a bad way to discourage callers.
In April, as I wrote, the agency faced backlash about limiting customer service for millions of seniors and backed off its plan to cut phone service.
Kathleen Romig, director of Social Security and disability policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told me this is the latest move Commissioner Frank Bisignano has made to pull back data previously available to the public. She added that SSA also pulled videos of operational meetings, data on staff losses this year, and even most of the organization chart (which now only names Bisignano).
Read more: When will I get my Social Security check? Payment schedule for 2025.
Many Americans need more personal help figuring out Social Security questions, not less. The reality is that most Americans are clueless about basic concepts of how Social Security and other retirement topics work, according to a recent report from the TIAA Institute and the Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center at the George Washington University School of Business. Curious about your retirement know-how? Take the abbreviated quiz below.
This is not a Jeopardy question. Nearly half of workers who estimate how much they need to have saved for retirement are just guessing, according to a new report by the nonprofit Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies.
A large portion of workers in each generation imagine they will need to save a cool million or more. Possibly, they're on target. But hello. Stop dart tossing and at least check out calculators on sites such as AARP, Bogleheads, Fidelity, or Vanguard to get a better handle on this calculation.
Also troubling, according to the Transamerica report, more than 6 in 10 workers admit they do not know as much as they should about investing for retirement.
Lack of retirement literacy is a reality for most Americans, as I mentioned above.
Experts, me included, surmise that it's not so much that people are stupid as that they just haven't or don't want to think about how they would like their retirement years to play out — what types of things they will want and need to spend their money on so they can enjoy life.
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Feeling squeamish? Nearly half of Americans are too nervous to invest right now, up from 4 in 10 in the first quarter of this year. They are worried about their retirement savings more than they have in the last six years, according to a study out this week from Allianz Life that was fielded in May. That's the highest since 2019.'In general, people feel the pain of losing money more than they feel joy in gaining money,' Kelly LaVigne, vice president of Consumer Insights at Allianz Life, told me. 'For people who are still many years away from retirement, staying the course is the best option,' LaVigne said. 'But recent market volatility highlights the need to incorporate risk management into a retirement strategy.'
Precisely what I wrote about in this column about how to protect your money. Everyday folks, especially those approaching retirement, are unnerved by all the drama that has gone down so far this year. There is a feeling that we are always waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Lindsay Theodore, a senior manager and certified financial planner at T. Rowe Price, told me her best advice in these times: Ride out those uneasy feelings by staying patiently invested in a diversified and age-appropriate mix of stocks, bonds, and cash.
Read more: How to start investing: A 6-step guide
All you target-date fund investors can take a breath.
Kerry Hannon is a Senior Columnist at Yahoo Finance. She is a career and retirement strategist and the author of 14 books, including the forthcoming "Retirement Bites: A Gen X Guide to Securing Your Financial Future," "In Control at 50+: How to Succeed in the New World of Work," and "Never Too Old to Get Rich." Follow her on Bluesky.
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