Bill Bensur has joined the national
investment leadership team of Towers Watson and will head the firm’s investment
office in Pittsburgh.
Bensur will lead the Pittsburgh investment
office, which offers the company’s full suite of investment services, including
risk assessment, strategic asset allocation, investment manager research and
selection, and outsourced CIO (OCIO) services. He will be tasked with expanding
both the OCIO and traditional consulting businesses in North America.
Bensur was previously at Wilshire Associates,
which he joined in 1991 to establish its Pittsburgh office. He departed in
January as a managing director and, since 2006, a member of the firm’s board of
directors. At Wilshire, Bensur provided investment advice including strategic
asset allocation, risk management and manager selection to a range of
institutional investors comprising corporate and public defined benefit plans,
endowments and foundations, among other organizations.
Bensur
is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) and a member of the Chartered Financial
Analysts Society of Pittsburgh.
Income from individual retirement accounts (IRAs) and 401(k)-type plans was being missed in the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS), EBRI says.
A
new analysis by the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) shows that new questions to measure income in the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population
Survey (CPS) revealed a significant amount of income from individual retirement
accounts (IRAs) and 401(k)-type plans was being missed across all levels of
income for Americans age 65 or older.
However,
even using new questions, Social Security remains by far the predominant source
of income for Americans of retirement age (65 or older), especially for those with
incomes in the bottom half. More than 60% of individuals in the lowest two
income quartiles receive more than 90% of their total income from Social
Security, even when accounting for the additional IRA and 401(k)-type plan
income.
“The
new measure of income in the CPS finds significantly more income that is from
IRAs and 401(k)-type retirement plans than what has been reported under the old
measure of income in CPS,” says Craig Copeland, senior research associate at
EBRI. “But for those in the lower-income brackets—and even for those with
higher incomes—Social Security income remains extremely important for older
Americans.”
NEXT: How much more income?
Specifically,
the new EBRI analysis finds:
The
new measure of income in the CPS identifies significantly more income (and a
much larger percentage of income coming from IRAs and 401(k)-type plans).
Compared with the estimated amount under the traditional income questions for
2013, the redesigned questions resulted in an estimated total income 9.1%
larger for those ages 65 or older, an aggregate amount of almost $133 billion
more. Retirement income was 27.9% larger, or almost $71 billion in aggregate.
Income
from IRAs and 401(k)-type plans was an important component of this higher
amount of retirement income found in the new questions, which overall was more
than 250% higher than that found by the traditional measure. Phrased another
way, the traditional CPS measure under-reported IRA and 401(k)-type income by
more than 250%.
Those
with IRAs, 401(k)-type plan and defined benefit pension income from private-
and public-sector employers are more likely to be in the upper-income quartiles
because they are far more likely to have these sources. Consequently, those who
both had access and took advantage of these plans are the ones with higher
amounts of this income in retirement—and not necessarily those who had the
highest overall incomes prior to retirement.
NEXT: The problem with the prior survey design.
The
Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the CPS (fielded in March of each
year)—which EBRI says is a widely cited source of data on income for those old
enough to be considered retired (age 65 or older)—has not kept up with the
change in the private-sector retirement landscape from predominantly defined
benefit (DB) plans to predominantly defined contribution (DC) plans. This
survey has misclassified certain types of income and generally under-reported
income— in particular, retirement income—because the questions did not properly
ask about income from sources that did not provide an annuity payment like that
has been traditionally paid from DB plans.
Last
year the Census Bureau revised the income questions to in the hope of reducing
the discrepancies from the prior design. The 2014 CPS conducted a test of the
new set of income questions by doing a spilt-panel design, where 3/8 of the
sample received the redesigned questions while the remaining 5/8 received the
traditional questions. The new EBRI research compares results from the old and
new methods.
The full report,
“Individual Retirement Account Balances, Contributions, and Rollovers, 2013;
With Longitudinal Results 2010–2013: The EBRI IRA Database,” is published in the
May 2015 EBRI Issue Brief, online at www.ebri.org.