Coming Up Short - by Alicia H Munnell & Annika Sunden (Paperback)

About the Book

As the baby boom begins to withdraw from the labor force, ensuring a secure retirement income becomes an increasingly important issue, the number of people over age 65 is expected to double by 2030. That trend will continue, accompanied by worries about stock market...

Book Synopsis

As the baby boom begins to withdraw from the labor force, ensuring a secure retirement income becomes an increasingly important issue, the number of people over age 65 is expected to double by 2030. That trend will continue, accompanied by worries about stock market volatility, corporate malfeasance, a rapidly changing economy, and the viability of Social Security. In Coming Up Short, two experts on retirement policy analyze 401(k) plans, the fastest-growing type of employer-sponsored pensions and a vital source of retirement income for the American middle class. Alicia Munnell and Annika Sunden chronicle the development of 401(k) plans, now the dominant form of private pensions. In accessible language, they explain how such plans work and discuss their popularity. For employees, these plans are appealing becuase they have more control over their own retirement funds, and the plans are portable. For employers, the plans are generally less costly than defined benefit plans. Despite those advantages, there are some significant downsides to 401(k) plans. These plans shift all the risk and responsibility to employees, who must decide whether to join, how much to contribute, how to invest, whether to ""cash out"" when changing jobs, and how to manage their nest egg in retirement. These are difficult decisions, and while in theory 401(k)s could be an effective savings vehicle for retirement, in practice many people make mistakes at every step along the way. Com ing Up Short discusses why these mistakes are made and proposes various reforms to ensure that the aging population will have adequate retirement income. Comprehensive and up-to-date, Coming Up Short is an essential resource on 401(k) plans for financial service professionals, policymakers, academics, and individuals planning for their own retirement.

Review Quotes

"[The authors] have organized their book around the sequence of decisions Americans must make about 401(k)s--whether to participate, how much to contribute and so forth--and their findings are disconcerting." -- "Los Angeles Times Book Review"

"COMING UP SHORT is a highly practical resource for not only financial service professionals, students and policymakers, but also lay individuals planning their own retirement. Highly recommended." -- "Wisconsin Bookwatch", 5/1/2005

"In 'Coming Up Short, ' Boston College economists Alicia H. Munnell and Annika Sunden show that so many people have 'goofed up' so much of the time that the shimmering promise of a private, voluntary, 401(k)-based retirement system, which so enticed policymakers and ordinary Americans, is essentially chimera....Munnell and Sunden do not propose to toss over 401(k)s but to improve them. But the bottom line is so at odds with what most people expect that it throws into question all of the attention, affection and support that Americans lavished on stocks in the 1990s. The bottom line, according to the authors, is that the median combined balance of 401(k)s and IRAs for 45- to 54- year-old workers--the first generation that will have to rely almost entirely on these accounts to supplement Social Security--is $37,000, or about an extra $200 a month in retirement benefits." --Peter G. Gosselin, Los Angeles Times, "Los Angeles Times", 2/1/2004

"Munnell and Sunden ask the right questions and provide sensible, clear answers for helping the average worker build a better retirement." --Beth Kobliner, author, GET A FINANCIAL LIFE

"Munnell and Sunden nail down the evidence and chart some paths to a retirement system that works. Theirs is an important and absolutely necessary book." --Jane Bryant Quinn, author of MAKING THE MOST OF YOUR MONEY

"Munnell's ideas are based on a simple notion: that some of the burden for decision making has to be lifted from the shoulders of workers. In her book, she proposes a series of defaults, automatic fallbacks that would be applied to 401(k) accounts unless an individual chose to opt out....Munnell would like to see government take a bigger role, a difficult sell in the current political climate. Still, she is convinced some kind of reform is critical." --Charles Stein, "Boston Globe", 1/31/2004

"Overall, the book provides an excellent background to a discussion of whether a pension system that relies so heavily upon the 401(k) plan will provide adequate retirement income security in the futture. The literature review is current, wide-ranging and accessible to a wide audience. The discussion of the regulatory environement is sufficient for an understnading of the research covered in the book and a cursory overview is provided in an appendix." --Richard Disney, Professor fo Economics, Universtiy of Nottingham, "Journal of Pensions, Economics, and Finance", 7/7/2004

"The [authors'] reforms offer an ingenious way of guiding choices in pension saving without compulsion." -- "The Economist"

"This valuable volume contains everything you always wanted to know about 401(k) plans, but didn't know enough to ask--written in clear English by two real experts." --Alan Blinder, professor of economics, Princeton University

About the Author

Alicia H. Munnell is the Peter F. Drucker Professor of Management Sciences at Boston College's Carroll School of Management and director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. A former member of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, she has written or edited numerous books. Annika Sund?n is the a research associate at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College and a senior economist at the Swedish National Social Insurance Board.