ERISA is Cool, After All...

Written by: Nick Curabba

Any blogger cool enough to mention rocker Meatloaf, punk band The Clash, and ERISA all in one post deserves credit.  But combine all that, as Jerry Kalish of Retirement Plan blog did, with a link to YouTube, and you hit a pop-culture grandslam.

More substantively, Mr. Kalish's post discusses and links to a recent Watson Wyatt study about the influences that bear on a person's decision about when to retire. The study finds, perhaps not surprisingly, that among other factors, the type of workplace retirement plan a person has could be predictive of retirement timing.  In other words, a person with a vested benefit in a DB plan is more likely to retire than a similarly situated person with just a defined contribution plan.

The Watson Wyatt study is interesting, too, in light of the recent book from Alicia Munnell and Steven Sass of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.  As the title suggests, Working Longer: The Solution to the Retirement Income Challenge may have its own ideas about when people will decide to retire in the future.