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Retirement Bliss Becomes Nightmare

I feel so bad when I hear of retirees who are experiencing financial distress. True, there are no guarantees in life, and that includes financial security. But it still saddens me that a person could work so hard, for so long, and not retire comfortably, if at all. And the data points to more of these heart-breaking stories ahead, according to the New York Times’ John Leland and Louis Uchitelle. Back on September 23, they wrote:

Today’s retirees have less money in savings, longer life expectancies and greater exposure to market risk than any retirees since World War II. Even before the last week of turmoil, 39 percent of retirees said they expected to outlive their savings, up from 29 percent in 2007, according to a survey by the Employee Benefit Research Institute, an industry-sponsored group in Washington…

Older people with few assets, including the one-third of retirees who rely on Social Security for 90 percent or more of their income, may not suffer directly from the decline in the stock market, but they feel the pain of higher gas and food prices and reductions in volunteer services like Meals on Wheels, which have been curtailed because of fuel costs.

The collapse of the housing market has hit older homeowners. According to the Center for Retirement Research, Americans over age 63 pulled $300 billion out of their home equity through refinancing from 2001 to 2006, lowering their net worth.

Surveys by AARP, the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies and the Employee Benefit Research Institute have found that more workers nearing retirement age are putting off their plans to retire, curtailing contributions to their 401(k) accounts and borrowing from the accounts to pay for living expenses, including credit card and mortgage debt.

After three decades of decline, a higher percentage of Americans older than 55 are now working than at any time since 1970, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. Some are working because they want to, but many because they need to.

The McKinsey Global Institute reported in June that the typical worker would have to work to age 70 to maintain his or her standard of living in retirement.

Source:

“More to Fear in World of Retirees”
John Leland, Louis Uchitelle
New York Times, September 23, 2008

Home Values And Declining Net Worth

You’ve heard the expression. “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Earlier today, Money Magazine senior editor Walter Updegrave wrote on the CNN Money website:

You already know that the housing crisis has wreaked havoc with the economy and financial markets, not to mention the lives of millions who’ve lost or could lose their homes. But there may be a less obvious casualty too: your retirement prosperity.

According to a recent report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington, D.C. think tank, the collapse of house prices that started in 2006 has wiped out more than $4 trillion in home equity, putting a sizable dent in the net worth of millions of baby boomers.

Among its more ominous findings: By next year, the average net worth of households headed by homeowners age 45 to 54 will be almost 25% less than it was in 2004.

Now, that last number depends on U.S. home prices stabilizing next year. But what if prices continue to fall?

Any questions?

Source:

“How the housing crash hurts your retirement”
Walter Updegrave
CNN Money, September 2, 2008

New Study: Housing Bust Causing Massive Losses In Household Wealth

Just wanted to share a press release with you from the think-tank of our old friend, Dean Baker:

Housing Market Meltdown Will Cause Massive Losses in Household Wealth

Plummeting house prices will leave millions of homeowners dependent almost exclusively on Social Security in their retirement

For Immediate Release: July 9, 2008
Contact: Alan Barber, (202) 293-5380 x 115

WASHINGTON, DC- As Senators McCain and Obama fine-tune their plans for Social Security in preparation for the 2008 presidential election, a new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) shows that, due to the collapse of the housing bubble, the vast majority of Americans have accumulated little or no wealth. This means that they will be almost completely reliant on Social Security and Medicare to support them in their retirement years.

The study, “The Impact of the Housing Crash on Family Wealth,” analyzed the wealth holdings of families in all age cohorts in 2004 and projected the wealth of these families in 2009. The findings are presented by income quintile under three scenarios- real house prices remain at current levels, real house prices fall by an additional 10 percent, or real house prices fall by an additional 20 percent. In all three scenarios, the vast majority of these families will have little or no housing wealth in 2009.

“This extraordinary destruction of wealth will have tremendous implications for millions of families,” said report co-author Dean Baker. “Coupled with a very low personal savings rate, this means that many people, especially those near retirement will only have Social Security and Medicare to rely on once they leave the workforce.”

The report projects that if house prices stay the same through 2009, the median household headed by a person between the ages of 45 and 54, those in their prime earning years, will have 24.7 percent less wealth than did the median household in this age group in 2004. These households will have accumulated just $113,268 in net worth in 2009, barely $15,000 more than their counterparts in 1989, whose net worth totaled $97,600.

If real house prices fall 10 percent, the median household in the 45 to 54 cohort will see a 34.6 percent loss in wealth compared with the median in 2004 while families in the 18 to 34 cohort will lose of 67.6 percent. If prices fall by 20 percent, the most pessimistic scenario, families in the 55-64 cohort will experience a loss of 49.6 percent of their wealth compared to the same cohort in 2004.

This analysis should also prompt serious re-examination of policy proposals to cut Social Security and Medicare for near retirees. Baker commented, “policies that perhaps could have been justified at the peak of the housing bubble make much less sense now that tens of millions of near-retirees have just seen most of their wealth disappear.”

In analyzing wealth holdings for these families, the authors used data from the Federal Reserve Board’s 2004 Survey of Consumer Finance. The authors also used the S&P 500 and the Case-Shiller 20-City Composite Index to adjust for equity values and home price changes between 2004 and 2009.

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The Center for Economic and Policy Research is an independent, nonpartisan think tank that was established to promote democratic debate on the most important economic and social issues that affect people’s lives. CEPR’s Advisory Board of Economists includes Nobel Laureate economists Robert Solow and Joseph Stiglitz; Richard Freeman, Professor of Economics at Harvard University; and Eileen Appelbaum, Professor and Director of the Center for Women and Work at Rutgers University.

Source:

“Housing Market Meltdown Will Cause Massive Losses in Household Wealth”
Press Release
Center for Economic and Policy Research, July 9, 2008

Recession Outlook Goes Beyond Psychology

While reading a Bloomberg piece by Caroline Baum earlier today, I noticed that the senior U.S. economist at JPMorgan Chase & Co., Jim Glassman, said that the Fed yesterday “could have put an end to this recession discussion, which is a psychological thing right now.” Psychological? Maybe. But the prospect of an economic recession in the United States looks to be based on more than just fear. Take the latest Wall Street Journal survey of economists, for example. On Monday, the Journal said that of the 52 individuals polled:

…the economists, on average, now put the chances of a recession at 38%, the highest in more than three years, and up from 33.5% in November. They also reduced forecasts for U.S. economic growth across the board. They expect the nation’s gross domestic product to grow at an annualized rate of 0.9% this quarter, down from 1.6% in the previous survey, with six economists expecting either a negative or a flat reading. Three economists project an economic contraction in the first quarter, with the average growth forecast at 1.5%, down from 1.9% in November.

Kathleen Camilli of Camilli Economics, “the most pessimistic forecaster in the survey,” according to the Journal, said she sees “the internal dynamics of the U.S. economy deteriorating into recession” this quarter. “Growth will be negative this quarter, nonfarm payrolls will be revised down, and from what I can see, personal-consumption expenditures are rapidly slowing,” the economist added. Also among the bear camp, Ramachandra Bhagavatula, a managing director at New York hedge fund Combinatorics Capital LLC, said:

What is happening is that household net worth is not growing by leaps and bounds — if anything it is going down — [which means] people actually have to start saving out of their current income. That has negative effects on spending growth. In many ways, I think the next five years in this economy could look like Japan after 1990. The big [growth] you got in variety of asset classes — financed by borrowing because of extraordinarily low rates — will come out. When you look at the economic landscape, stock prices are too high, house prices are too high, and you put all the pieces together and the size of the adjustment needed seems reasonably large. How many years does it take? Who knows? It doesn’t necessarily mean we have five years of recession — maybe just 3-4 quarters of recession.

Echoing such sentiment, economists at Morgan Stanley said Monday that the U.S. economy will likely go into recession in 2008. MarketWatch noted that Morgan Stanley is the first major Wall Street firm to predict a recession. Chief economist Richard Berner and U.S. economist David Greenlaw in an updated forecast on the firm’s Global Economic Forum web site said that domestic demand is expected to fall 1% annualized over the next three quarters with zero growth in gross domestic product and a 5% to 10% drop in corporate earnings. For the full year, Morgan Stanley sees 1% growth.