Rethinking a “deeply flawed” retirement system
Bernard Winograd is executive vice president of Prudential, which sells many of the financial pieces that Americans need for retirement. Even from the point of view of someone who sells insurance, mutual funds and annuities, though, the U.S. model of retirement savings is in need of repair.
I’m in Washington for the next few days at a program on “Retirement Issues in the 21st Century,” sponsored by the National Press Foundation. Winograd was the first speaker, and he started us off with a call to action:
The retail system in this country of explaining this (retirement) to people is deeply flawed. There are way too many people in the system without adequate training, and there are way too many people with the wrong motives.
When you combine the soaring cost of health care with the move away from traditional defined-benefit pensions, Americans are left with two big worries: How to avoid outliving their assets, and how to deal with potentially catastrophic health costs. It’s not a system that anybody designed, Winograd says, but
You are imposing on everybody the cost of saving for the worst case, and you are losing the benefit of pooling of risks that is found in a defined-benefit plan.
Even some “reforms” have fallen short. Target-date funds were supposed to solve the asset-allocation problem, but people close to retirement age were shocked when their 2010 target-date funds lost an average of 23 percent last year. Those folks are in what Prudential calls the retirement “Red Zone,” from five years before retirement to five years after.
Now comes the self-serving part. Prudential is a big seller of annuities, which Winograd thinks should play a bigger role in the 401k of the future. He admitted that annuities are “a much-maligned product,” partly because they’re expensive. Here, in his words, is why they cost so much:
The complexity is daunting for many people. It takes us two to three hours to sell people their first annuity. That means there’s a fairly hefty marketing load up front, so there is something to the argument about expenses.
When companies give retirees the choice of cashing out their 401k as an annuity, rather than a lump sum, few people do so. Winograd would like for people to have the option of investing a little bit at a time, through the 401k, in a variable annuity product with what Prudential calls a guaranteed minimum withdrawal benefit. He says the cost would come down if these things became widely available in 401k plans.
It seems to me, though, that until somebody brings down the cost of annuities dramatically, 401k investors will continue to avoid them — even if the alternative investments have flaws of their own.
We’ll be hearing from many other retirement experts in the next couple of days, and I’ll post more as I have time. Meanwhile, Prudential has an overview of the retirement landscape here.
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David Nicklaus has covered St. Louis business for more than 25 years. His column appears three days a week on the Post-Dispatch business page. 
We have a deeply flawed borrow-and-spend system. About 7 years ago my pension was abolished and I got a $5000 check in the mail. I was almost 10 years vested. Since then, I’ve saved 65% of my income NOT for “retirement,” but just under the account heading of “security.” My family literally ekes out a living on less than half of my income, after taxes. My peers, all of them, continue to borrow, spend and consume as if tomorrow doesn’t exist. From what I observe, everyone seems to assume they’ll live worry free with medical bennies paid-for and cash showing up monthly, from out of the blue, as most of their fathers do. To discuss the future, seriously, it’s almost taboo. I mean people get uncomfortable when you ask them: What are you doing about saving for retirement?