#it's almost all older college students and young professionals with some retirees

[animezinglife]

"Being a parent is hard! You wouldn't understand!"

I'm sure it is hard, but your kids don't have the right to be throwing mud at people's windows or destroying community spaces.

"They have behavioral issues!"

Charlene, you're one deflection attempt away from me adjusting your own behavioral issues permanently. Be a grown-up, take responsibility, and tell your brats no or as a bare minimum watch them.

[notbecauseofvictories]

There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less. Annie Dillard.

"No, really," the man at the bar says with second-hand pride. He gestures to the younger man beside him, who ducks his head, smiles. I have been quietly nursing the same beer for half an hour, listening to them talk to one another. They only occasionally remember that they have an audience, even more rarely that it's me. "He's a photographer, an artist. The kind that doesn't have a day job."

It's a Thursday night and the median age in the bar is somewhere in the late forties. The photographer and I make up the entire lower half of the bell-curve.

"Must be nice," interjects a third voice, from further down the bar. He's been largely quiet, his face turned away so he can watch the Phillies lose. "I'd like to be an artist."

The first man, the older man, laughs. "C'mon, we'd all like to be artists," he says with perfect sureness, as though this is a fact, immutable as gravity or the rising of the sun.

He works for the state, he told me; Department of Transportation. He works on "the turnpike." (I have only been in Philadelphia a week and a half, I don't know what he means, but I nod like I understand.) He gets good benefits, that's the thing. Otherwise he'd be an artist.

"What sort of artist?" I ask, an inconvenient reminder that I am still here, listening. Luckily, they seem to forget it again quickly; they're too busy arguing whether carpentry counts as art, and then the bartender asks if travel writing is art or journalism, is journalism an art? What is art, anyway?

I get their professions in bits and pieces: construction, plumber. An unlikely accountant, given the number of tattoos. A bartender, a host at a chain restaurant. An almost-attorney, not even through her second week.

In the end, we all agree: we would rather be artists.

.

It's instructive, moving to Philadelphia when all that waits for you there is an empty apartment and a borrowed air mattress. The bare walls force you out into the world, or at least to the nearest coffee shop with an internet connection. You spend a lot of time nursing lukewarm lattes, and googling "philly events + this weekend."

I don't remember how I found out about the Wagner Free Institute of Science. (There were a lot of recursively nested links, I clicked on all of them.) The museum itself was too far for a jaunt after work, but they were offering a free six-week class at a nearby library branch. The history of cartography: how maps evolved from second- or third-hand accounts of sundials to the real-time GPS math-sphere we know today.

It's been a few years since my last history of science class, but I have fond memories of wide-ranging, bitter arguments. The scientific method seems immutable until you realize that it was invented before modern mathematics, and produced reliable results that are laughable within the modern paradigm. An atom looks like a circle and x-y graphs are perfectly readable until you stop and consider that alchemists considered their dense, symbolic depictions legible too. The human knowledge-making endeavor is always specific to a time and place, and they shape one another.

(I love law's pragmatism, but there will always be a part of me longing for a two-hour argument about epistemology and whether we can ever really know anything.)

I decided to attend the class, thinking that it would be entertaining even if it was just me and the professor in a library conference room.

When I first walked into the conference room, I thought for a minute maybe I'd gone to the wrong library branch. There were too many people: some fifty-odd bodies, retirees and young professionals, a handful of college students. One young man in scrubs. Rows of uncomfortable metal chairs, and almost all of them were full. Shortly after I arrived, people had to be dispatched to go find more.

By the time the class started, people were leaning against the walls. I'm not sure who was more surprised, the professor or all of us.

It was one of the retirees who raised his hand first, as the professor talked about an Egyptian map of the underworld found on the bottom of a sarcophagus. "How do you know it's a map?" he asked. All I could see was his cheek, not-quite clean shaven. "How do we know it isn't art?"

Almost before he was finished speaking, three other hands went up.

By the end of the period, the professor had to gloss over Ptolemy in the last five minutes. There wasn't time for more, what with all the questions.

.

I am always a little startled when large numbers of people turn up to listen to opera.

There are a dizzying number of articles and thinkpieces about its imminent death. The pleas for donations get more and more feverish every year, even as the season is shrinking. All amid lamentations that it's a niche interest with a dwindling audience—opera is for old men and the pretentious, Harold Bloom et al. If you like singing there's musical theater and if you like drama there's the soaps; we as a culture have outgrown the need for valkyries, madwomen, and other assorted fat ladies singing.

Hence my surprise when, every year, Chicago's Lyric Opera fills Millennium Park to overflowing for their preview of the upcoming season. Families with children and dogs crowd up against retirees with bottles of wine and paper plates of fine cheese; everyone applauds. It's hard to imagine the death knell of opera on those nights, when couples bend their heads together and small children run through the crowd to the strains of "Mein lieber Hippolyte."

It's even harder to imagine when a broadcast—not even a live performance!—of "We Shall Not Be Moved" fills the mall of Independence National Historical Park.

Maybe it's the subject matter. A modern opera about racism and inequality, set in the shadows of the West Philadelphia MOVE bombings, is powerful and challenging content for an opera. "We Shall Not Be Moved" sold out during its initial run-through; in the shadow of Independence Hall, its questions about America's promise and the nature of the law took on a bitterly ironic quality. It's also a decidedly Philadelphia story, the rawness and relevancy only compounded when the National Park Supervisor introduced it by insisting her department has "a very good relationship with the Philadelphia police" alongside their commitment to supporting free speech.

Or maybe modern opera is more enticing—you have to love opera already to care about Lucia di Lammermor as the epitome of bel canto. You don't have to know anything to be intrigued by an opera about black children in Philadelphia. This is the artistic era we live in, Founding Fathers reference Biggie on Broadway, inner city kids perform chamber opera. For all I know, people turned up just to hear "girls want to get with it/North Philly slayer, player" sung in a sonorous bass-baritone.

But I think the truth is simpler: people still want to see opera, they've never stopped. They want to sit and listen to music, whisper to one another and watch. I was just behind a family of five: mother, father, and three boys, all at that age when they are mostly limbs and nervous energy. One—the oldest, a teenager, as evidenced by how hard he was trying to ignore the rest of his family—was defiantly trying to sleep, one arm thrown over his eyes. He moved only to shift to a new position, and once to pet a dog that wandered through the crowd.

An expensive ticket would have been wasted on him. But the event was free so he was there, sitting beside his brother and pretending, with all the bravura of adolescence, to be somewhere else. The light from the projector cast the rest of his family in silhouette: four faces, turned up to the screen. I wondered if all four of them would been there, if the tickets were sixty, ninety dollars each; if any of them would have come.

I'm distracted by a child, barely older than six, wandering through the audience. She stops suddenly, looking around and calling for her mother. The audience thrums like a plucked string to the sound, even in the half-dark you can see people's mouths shaping, lost, shaping, help. It only takes a few minutes for the child's brother to dart through the crowd and take her hand, whisk her away and back to their blanket. The audience settles again.

In a folding chair just a little ways away, an old woman is absently conducting, as though the musicians on screen could see her—one-two-one-two, just her hand for a baton.

[ginnyzero]

My Fashion Connection

I’ve been trying to pin down lately why I love fashion and fashion design. Because I don’t love clothes and designing clothes and the choosing of fabrics because of the glitz and glam of high end runway shows and the glossy pages of Vogue magazine and adulation of famous design houses. Most of that I didn’t even know about until I went to school. I didn’t choose fashion because of any of those things. I really wanted to go into Computer Game Design because of games like Myst.

Growing up in a very small town in the middle of the southern tier of New York, fashion wasn’t anything that anyone in our town was interested in except the town pageant queen who had a ‘reputation.’ It’s dairy country. My town was and is much more interested in dirt bikes, hunting and fishing and kegger beer parties. There were a couple of families that were more well to do and worked at Cornell or IBM and thus wore nicer clothes but out of a town of say 50 to 100 people, there were more cows and farmers and retirees. It’s the type of town when two of the young people marry each other, the entire town becomes related.

My mother is a home sewer. I hate the term sewer in professional capacity because it has the connotations of a house wife sitting at home making amateur garments. My mother made a lot of my sister’s clothes growing up and when she started sending me to Christian schools with dress codes, she also made clothes for me. (Mostly jumpers.) Eventually she either got tired of sewing or felt that we needed to buy things to keep up appearances and she stopped. (This ended up with us shopping in budget discount overrun boutique shops. Yes. A thing. Family Dollar and Dollar General didn’t exist yet! And mother hadn’t discovered the “joys” of the Salvation Army and second hand or they simply weren’t close enough to shop at.)

In a tiny town, you have to drive almost an hour in every direction to get to anything that remotely resembles a fabric shop. Except, between our tiny town and the city of Ithaca we got lucky, because out in a nowhere more nowhere than our nowhere was a tiny fabric shop run by a petite old woman named Leona.

To get to Leona’s shop, you took this very twisty road over and through the hills and turned right when you finally hit another ‘major’ road. And then off to the left less than a mile was a huge stand of pine trees and in the middle of these pines was a dirt drive. You’d drive up the hill between these tall pines the rocks in the dirt crunching under your tires that opened onto a clearing on top of a hill that held a farm. Leona ran her shop out of her home, a one story mixture of a red roofed, white trailer with an add on to make it an L shape. The barn hadn’t been kept up and the red stain was fading and the barn was falling apart. You parked on the edge of the drive, hoped it hadn’t rained lately and it wasn’t pure mud so you could get back out. (If you got stuck, there was always the local farmer with a tractor and chains to pull you out.) You had to park on the edge because despite the fact the farm wasn’t an active farm, she rented out the land and your cars needed to be out of the way for the tractors to get through.

She had the shop in the add on built on the back of the trailer. Firewood piled up next to the screen door and cats lounged everywhere. Leona liked hoarding things so the walkway had gnomes, garden statues and benches and wheelbarrows and yes, there was a tiny garden windmill in the middle of the circular drive. If it was winter, salt crunched under your boots and you had to walk carefully across the ice covered mud slush. If it was spring or summer, there were flowers peeping up among the grass.

And once you crossed the threshold, warmth, Leona smiling with her curly short white hair and the measuring tape around her neck behind the measuring counter. Bolts and bolts of colorful and textured fabrics lined the walls and the blank spaces of walls over tables were old fashioned wall paper in dark red with ducks or cream and pink rose prints and warm golden colored wood panels. Painted sawblades provided decoration. The clock might have been a novelty item, a cow or a cat or even something with shears for the hands. I can’t remember. (There might have been all three.) It smelled mostly of sawdust, dust and in the winter, the sharp smell of a burning fire from the potbelly stoves. Leona’s help were also middle aged or older ladies like her and they weren’t quite as friendly, but they were helpful.

Leona stocked her shop by going down to NYC and buying overruns from the warehouses. (Overruns are fabrics that designers don't end up using and fabrics manufacturers make too much of because they predict more sales than they make. Most fabric retail stores are stocked by overruns.) She mostly had colorful cotton prints and upholstery fabric. There was a little fashion fabric and by the time I hit high school, she had things like stretch velvet. She mostly sold to quilters and people like my mother. Cornell doesn’t have a fashion design program, only a science textiles program, but she’d occasionally get students. Her hours were irregular. I don’t know if she ever turned a profit. She encouraged touching the fabric. (Though she didn’t like children taking bolts out of the shelves for good reason.) She didn’t mind that I wandered about away from my mother. She always remembered me no matter how much time had passed.

But every time I go into a fabric shop, there is still that bit of magic from going to Leona’s. When I returned from college, I wanted to go and show Leona some of my projects. She died before I got the chance and I still regret that.

Professional shops like Mood, Britex, B&J’s and to an extent the discount fabric warehouse that I used during college in San Francisco make me shake my head because the workers don’t always feel helpful. They don’t make you feel like every customer is important. They aren’t like Leona, as frail as she was, with her sunny smiles and slightly raspy voice, glasses, and cheerful attitude and love of textiles.

I also had Barbie. I’ve talked about Barbie and my love of Barbie. I would play with Barbie rather than with baby dolls. (My baby dolls took lots of naps according to my mother.) And I loved the clothing packs. I loved dressing and undressing her and trying new outfits out of the outfits I had. Barbie was a safe present to buy for me when I was growing up, because a) that meant my group of Barbie’s got new clothes and b) if this Barbie had different color hair or skin then I got more variety in my Barbies. (My favorite was the long red headed mermaid with the teal outfit. This was back when the tail was a “Skirt” you could take on and off.) I had maybe one Ken and I inherited a lot of clothes from my older sister who grew out of Barbie about the time I started getting interested. Some of them were homemade but I couldn’t get my mother to make more and she wouldn’t teach me how to sew to make them myself. (In fact, she said it was too hard and downright discouraged it. Guess who doesn’t really like sewing? Me.)

Today, I love Monster High and Ever After High, but if they’d existed when I was a child, I wouldn’t have gotten them because of my parents’ extreme dislike of anything related to monsters, ghosts or Halloween. (I am a November child people. This is ridiculous. Come on, I share a birthday with Bram Stoker. OKAY.)

And somewhere in that time, (1992 apparently, man, I was younger than I thought) when I was getting a pittance of an allowance and had saved money from Christmas, I had enough money to buy a new Barbie or a Crayola Fashion Design stencil/tracing kit. This was before Project Runway. This was before the idea that these Fashion Drawing kits were thought to be remotely popular. No one thought that little girls might like drawing clothes! (Go figure.) The Easy Bake Oven was still the biggest and most innovative thing for a girl’s toy. But Crayola came out with a stencil kit with a bunch of papers that had design outlines, and pattern rubbing plates and a light box. Everything in the kit was meant to fit in the light box. The light box was plastic, pink and ran on D batteries (not included bummer.) And I had just enough money to buy it or a new Barbie. (I think my only other difficult choice that compares to this was the Star Craft Battle Chest and something else and I chose the Battle Chest.)

(I can't believe I found a picture of that, someone is selling one on ebay.) Because, I mean, a new Barbie would only give me one set of new clothes, with this fashion design kit I could draw clothes, lots and lots and lots of clothes. I had always been an artistic child. I liked drawing. This had never really been encouraged except in the “here, have another set of colored pencils, pastels, watercolors, no lessons included.” So, here was Barbie in paper form! I didn’t have to take the clothes on and off. I could just trace what they had on the sheets or try to come up with stuff myself.

Pages of my Fashion Design Kit Now

I’m not going to say I was very good at it. The point was, I had fun, this was something to do that didn’t involve playing a game on the computer or reading a book or practicing my piano and I hadn’t gotten into writing at this age. So, from using this stencil, I started with encouragement of one of my friends, to try and make it more real life proportion and draw the figures myself (once again without any sort of drawing classes. The art classes at my school were a joke.) I bought sketchbooks and took them to school with me. I started writing because of this same friend.

It was frankly an escape. My allowance never grew bigger. So, it went towards buying new books to read, sketchbooks and replenishing my Crayola colored pencils. (Though Imperial ones were better but I only got those out of the colored pencil color by number kits.) I didn’t buy fashion magazines. The idea of fashion as a career wasn’t on my radar. I didn’t have a career on my radar. College was one of those, “I’ll think about it later,” things.

The girls at my school who were cheerleaders and liked fashion weren’t precisely my friends and felt like complete foreigners and strangers to me. I didn’t ‘get’ them. We had our groups and we stuck to them. Having arrived to this school after the groups were formed, I fit nowhere and living so far away from everyone else, there was no way that I could feasibly see to hang out with them after school in order to get to know them well enough to fit into one of the groups at all.

Magazines were a luxury in our house. Vogue never made it into the house ever. It took until after 7th grade and a major fight that we even got the newspaper. So by the time I hit eleventh and twelfth grade and college was ‘mandatory’ and I had a list of requirements for what college I could go to, I had to look through what the colleges offered versus what I was interested in and thought I could be good at. (Let me say that writing wasn’t considered because my mother was very anxious about me being able to have a ‘real job.’) And the practice test for the ACT in 10th grade came with this odd employment aptitude test thing to help you find the job that would be the right fit. (Goodness knows if it was remotely accurate.) Fashion design was in my “right fit” category. And between all the majors, there was a tiny college in Ohio that happened to have a Fashion Design degree under their Health and Human Services Major. And since the only computer graphics and gaming major I could find was at a Calvinist college in Michigan, I thought the Mennonite College in Ohio was probably a better idea.

I didn’t read fashion magazines. I didn’t know really how to sew. (Sewing lessons with my mother were a complete disaster.) I couldn’t make a pattern. I had absolutely no portfolio. There were three things I liked, writing, computer games and drawing clothes. And let’s be clear, I wasn’t that great at drawing clothes and my designs at the time probably weren’t that innovative. I had to make a choice and what very little information I could glean from the Ithaca Public Library (seriously, you’d think having Ithaca College and Cornell, the library would be better,) fashion seemed the way to go. It was a massive industry. It had to have work available after I attained my degree.

Oh to be that young and naïve again. Probably sheltered is the better term.

I was over a year and a half into my fashion degree at this tiny college when someone finally thought to clue me in that “to get a design degree you have to have an art minor.” Realizing that this was utterly ridiculous and that making patterns in ¼ of the size wasn’t really going to get me anywhere after trying to talk with one of the other students about whether or not we could really get work after going to this school, (I’m sorry, sweetie, I hope you realized I was trying to convince myself as well as you,) I transferred out and into the Academy of Art. (And this took another large fight.)

Where, I had a lot of credits but I essentially had to start from the beginning. So, having those credits wasn’t actually to my advantage because the numbers of credit hours earned made it appear that I had more experience than I did. This got me more scrutiny and really a worse college experience.

Let’s understand something, I grew up in New York. The Fashion Institute of Technology is part of the SUNY system of colleges. I was a New York resident. It would have been fairly cheap for me to go to FIT. My parents didn’t want me in NYC or at a secular school. Parsons was always out of the question because it’s as costly as Cornell and I understood that. FIT would have been an extremely LOGICAL CHOICE.

Oh well, I loved San Francisco. I loved the big city/small town feel of it and the ability to walk most places and the public transit. If it wasn’t so expensive to live there, I might still be there.

So, schooling wore away at me, but it didn’t dim my love of creating clothes. My love of creating clothes was never founded or predicated upon the idea that success was a runway show and a big fancy store and my name in lights. I didn’t want to be the next Coco Chanel. I didn’t know who she was and at the time I started drawing clothes, I frankly didn’t care. My going into fashion was me going “here is something I love and enjoy doing, can I make a job out of it? Yes. Yes. I can.”

No one can take that from me. I might get bored or tired, but you can’t take the love of creating away from me.

And by the way, I still don’t read Vogue. It’s out of date before it’s printed and 75% advertisements. I also still don’t care about a runway show or seeing my name in lights as a “name” of a brand. That’s not the fashion price point I do or understand. And that’s okay, despite the push by fashion schools to design for that price point and that should be your goal, there is a lot more to fashion than ready to wear. Maybe that gives me an advantage, maybe it doesn't. That's not my connection to fashion. Magical fabric shops, Barbie, Crayola, the joy of creating, those are my fashion connections. And those are a lot more tangible than a runway or a name in lights by my account.

[omcik-blog]

New Post has been published on OmCik

New Post has been published on http://omcik.com/changing-jobs-or-careers-will-be-much-more-difficult-under-the-gop-health-plan/

Changing jobs or careers will be much more difficult under the GOP health plan

In recent years, millions of middle- and working-class Americans have moved from job to job, some staying with one company for shorter stints or shifting careers midstream.

The Affordable Care Act has enabled many of those workers to get transitional coverage that provides a bridge to the next phase of their lives — a stopgap to get health insurance if they leave a job, are laid off, start a business or retire early.

If the Republican replacement plan approved by the House becomes law, changing jobs or careers could become much more difficult.

More from New York Times:

Across the nation, Americans in their 50s and early 60s, still too young to qualify for Medicare, could be hit hard by soaring insurance costs, especially people now eligible for generous subsidies through the existing federal health care law.

This news scares Fern Warnat, 59. She has gotten insurance on the federal marketplace a couple of times in the last few years. When she and her husband moved from New York to Boca Raton, Fla., she bought a policy for a few months to tide her over until she got coverage from a new job. A year later, she needed to buy insurance again when she found herself unemployed. The policy was expensive — around $800 a month.

“It wasn’t easy, but it was available,” she said.

Now she worries what would happen under the Republican plan if she left her job at a home health company that provides insurance.

“I need something to be there,” she said. “I’m going to be 60 years old. All my conditions pre-exist.”

Since the Affordable Care Act was enacted, companies have become less worried about people who want to leave but feel locked into their jobs because of health insurance, said Julie Stone, who works with corporations at Willis Towers Watson, a benefits consultant. The law “removed one of the barriers to leaving your job,” she said.

Fewer employers now offer health insurance for their retirees, she said. The other alternative is Cobra, the federal law that requires companies to allow workers to remain on their employer’s plan if they pay the full monthly premiums, which are often extremely expensive and out of reach for many people. The coverage generally lasts no more than a year and a half. Cobra was a “Band-Aid on a broken market,” Ms. Stone said.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated in last month that states covering one-sixth of the population would take waivers that allowed insurers to charge people with pre-existing conditions more. It predicted that such consumers “would be unable to purchase comprehensive coverage with premiums close to those under current law and might not be able to purchase coverage at all.”

The budget office did note that the House bill would potentially lead to lower prices, especially for younger and healthier people. In most markets, the low premiums would “attract a sufficient number of relatively healthy people to stabilize the market.”

But the budget office also warned that markets in states that allowed insurers to charge higher premiums for people with pre-existing conditions — whether high blood pressure, a one-time visit to a specialist or cancer — could become unstable. Some places are already experiencing a dearth of insurers. More companies could exit as they struggled to make money in highly uncertain conditions.

Millions of people could also wind up with little choice but to buy cheap plans that provided minimal coverage in states that opted out of requiring insurers to cover maternity care, mental health and addiction treatment or rehabilitation services, among other services required under the Affordable Care Act. Consumers who could not afford high premiums would wind up with enormous out-of-pocket medical expenses.

The individual market has always been characterized by heavy churn, and insurers struggle to meet the needs of these short-timers, particularly the young and healthy, for whom coverage can be expensive. “It’s a huge challenge, even independent of the A.C.A.,” said John Graves, a health policy expert at Vanderbilt University.

Insurers say they have had a hard time accurately estimating the medical costs of the changing pool of customers who need relatively short-term coverage and pricing their plans high enough to cover those costs. Aetna, one of the large national insurers that has decided to leave the market, said about half of its customers were new, and it blamed “high churn” as one reason the company lost money.

Older people with potentially the most expensive conditions account for almost 30 percent of those who enrolled for insurance on the exchanges this year.

David Clark wanted to retire from his job at Sam’s Club at age 62, three years before he would qualify for Medicare. He and his wife, Phyllis, who now live in Delray Beach, Fla., were not in good health. He has a heart ailment, and she has diabetes. Before passage of the Affordable Care Act, he said, he would have had to keep working.

“We wouldn’t have been able to buy insurance at any price,” he said.

But he was able to retire and get coverage on one of the marketplaces. “This has been three of the greatest years of our life,” said Mr. Clark, who spends much of his time mentoring college students. When he needed triple bypass surgery at age 64, he was covered.

Many people are keenly aware that the existing marketplaces provide a safety net, even if it is far from ideal.

Dr. Marie Valleroy was able to stop working because she could afford to buy insurance on the federal exchange for four years until she was old enough to get Medicare. She has multiple sclerosis, and her symptoms were making it harder for her to see patients in Portland, Ore. “It was time for me to retire, truthfully,” she said. Her medications cost upward of $5,000 a month.

And the law made it possible for Bobby Evans, now 35, to move to New Orleans two years ago to be with his girlfriend, now his wife. Because he was working part time until he could find a permanent position, he bought a policy through the state marketplace.

He and his wife have talked about opening their own consulting firm, but the plan is being delayed, he said, depending on what happens with the federal law providing individual insurance. “Health care is a big-time barrier for a lot of people’s professional growth,” Mr. Evans said.

[omcik-blog]

New Post has been published on OmCik

New Post has been published on http://omcik.com/moving-the-retirement-outcome-needle-3-studies-shed-light/

Moving the retirement outcome needle: 3 studies shed light

Many workers they need a lifetime income option in their employer-sponsored retirement plan, but more than 4 in 10 are unsure whether they have one. (Photo: Thinkstock)

Consider these statistics:

Some 85 percent of plan participants who report an easy transition into retirement say they shared their retirement vision with their partner;

More than 9 in 10 retirees who have an annuity are satisfied with their investment decision; and

The prospect of receiving financial advice at no additional cost is the most popular of free perks an employer can offer — more popular than on-site medical care or a free lunch prepared by an on-site chef.

Related: Dreaming of savvier savers: start-up joins the 401(k) fray

So reports TIAA in research the company conducted for three studies in 2016, including a “Lifetime Income Survey,” “Voice of Experience Survey” and the “Advice Matters Survey.” Taken together, the studies highlighted the increasingly important role of worksite-based retirement planning, a continuing disconnect between reality and workers’ expectations about retirement, and the benefits to be achieved from outcome-oriented retirement solutions.

To learn more about the impact of these studies on advisors and plan participants, LifeHealthPro interviewed David Ray, a senior managing director and head of institutional retirement plan sales, and a provider of financial services to the not-for-profit space including the academic, research, medical, cultural and government fields. The following are excerpts.

LHP: I was particularly intrigued by TIAA’s “Voices of Experience” survey, which observes that more retirees are approaching retirement with “excitement and optimism.” This seems at odd with the often downbeat narrative one sees in many retirement surveys. Would you agree?

Ray (pictured at right): Yes, but the survey validates the findings of other TIAA research in respect to employees’ financial priorities and the role that lifetime income solutions play in retirement. These products are top-of-mind for the oldest baby boomers: those now 70 1/2, the age at which required minimum distributions must be taken from tax-deferred retirement accounts, such as IRAs, 401(k)s and 403(b) plans.

LHP: Did the findings of the three surveys largely dovetail with your expectations? Were there surprises?

Ray: The research mostly aligned with what we anticipated, but there were a few surprises. In respect to the Advice Matters Survey, one was the proportion of plan participants — about 35 percent of those we polled — who haven’t worked with a financial advisor and don’t believe they have enough wealth to justify doing so. Almost 50 percent of these employees believe they need at least $50,000 in savings to even merit a meeting with a financial professional.

Related: Need an identity theft lawyer? 5 benefits trends to watch

The next generation of qualified plan target date funds will embed a lifetime income option, says TIAA’s David Ray. (Photo: Thinkstock)

LHP: And such a threshold isn’t necessary, correct?

Ray: Yes. This runs contrary to what we’ve always said: that the earlier you fully engage an advisor, the better off you are. TIAA survey respondents who began preparing for retirement before age 30 were more likely to retire before age 60. The vast majority — over 97 percent — who were early planners said they were very satisfied with their retirement.

Related: Beyond retirement: Prudential makes case for financial wellness

We were also pleased to see how many employees believe they need a lifetime income option in their plan; and that the number one goal for the plan should be providing a guaranteed monthly income. But almost 41 percent of the people we interviewed for our Lifetime Income Survey were unsure as to whether their current plan offered that option. So there’s a disconnect between what they think the goal should be and their knowledge of what’s in the plan.

LHP: I understand that the Department of Labor has, in response to a TIAA request for comment, okayed using annuities as a qualified default investment alternative or QDIA in qualified plan target-date funds. Any thoughts?

Ray: I see this as a positive development. Research from our previous surveys shows that the vast majority of plan participants who were in target date funds thought they had a lifetime income option even when they didn’t. We think the next generation of target date funds will embed this option. So we’re very pleased with the DOL comment.

Regardless of what happens to employees during their lifetime, they’ll need a base level of income. The bills keep coming in retirement; you have to have some way to cover them — and over a lifetime, not just through life expectancy.

The problem with systematic withdrawal planning is that it only projects income needs through one’s life expectancy. In contrast, an annuity continues payments for as long as you live; and, with a death benefit, for as long as your spouse lives. That’s a critical differentiator. The only vehicle via which you can get lifetime income is through an annuity, be it variable or fixed — both of which TIAA offers — or a fixed indexed product.

Related: Boosting employee loyalty: It’s all about the benefits

LHP: The TIAA research indicates that a majority of plan participants who have received financial counseling feel confident about their financial situation, versus 37 percent who haven’t. Does this speak to the need for greater involvement by plan sponsors in availing employees of financial counseling as part of a retirement plan?

Ray: Yes. An advisor can play a crucial role in increasing workers’ financial confidence — confidence that can reduce financial stress and make employees more productive on the job. That’s one key benefit for employers. A second is this: Three in four plan participants say they would be more likely to consider a job if it offered financial advice at no additional cost as part of a benefits package.

Related: Workplace benefits: The new employer battleground

Paying off student loan debt is a big issue for millennials, but they shoudn’t fall into the trap of thinking they can’t afford to save for retirement. (Photo: Thinkstock)

LHP: Do not-for-profit organizations that TIAA caters to face unique challenges in the qualified plan space? Or do you find their issues pretty much overlap with those of the for-profit world?

Ray: They largely align, as do the retirement and income planning tools that we and other financial services firms make available to non-profits. One difference we have noted is that non-profits, such as colleges and universities, tend to be more paternalistic than their for-profit counterparts. And, as a result, workers tend to be more loyal, making employee retention somewhat less of an issue.

Indeed, many non-profit staffers are “reluctant retirees:” They have the wherewithal to retire, but don’t want to because they enjoy the work. They can’t imagine doing anything else. You don’t see this as much in the for-profit world.

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LHP: How much interest are you seeing among millennials in engaging in retirement planning earlier during their working lives?

Ray: There’s a growing interest in retirement planning among this cohort, but their immediate needs differ from those of Gen Xers and the baby boomers. These needs notably include paying off student loans and putting in a place a budget so they can begin to defer income.

Automated qualified plan services, including auto enrollment and auto escalation, as well as customizable planning tools and tailored support based on employees’ life stages, can help in putting employees in a retirement frame of mind, regardless of their life stage. These tools can simplify the evaluation of personal risk tolerance, asset allocation, and the current status of Social Security and Medicare, to help workers better envision and secure their future retirement objectives.

Related: Workplace financial wellness programs are growing

LHP: How much of a hurdle is student loan debt for millennials trying to setting aside money for retirement?

Ray: It’s a pretty big issue. What’s important is that millennials make conscious decisions, rather than ones that have unintended consequences. They need to avoid the trap of thinking they can’t afford to plan or invest for retirement — because they can’t afford not to.

Time and interest rates are on your side when you’re young. As you get older, it becomes difficult to catch up, if you ever can.

So providing millennials with retirement planning tools at the worksite is key. Even you have to underfund retirement savings for the next year or so to pay down student loan debt, at least that decision will be informed by an understanding of the financial impact on long-term savings.

LHP: Any final thoughts to share?

Ray: It’s so important to give employees a realistic view of retirement early in their careers. They sooner they can join a plan and make key decisions about retirement — whether it’s contributing more to the plan, deciding to leave the workforce later or being more aggressive with investment selections — the better off they’ll be.

As they say, hope is not a strategy. Workers need to take control of their retirement future, starting now. The earlier they begin, the more likely they’ll have the option of retiring when they want to, versus when they have to. 

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