FYI: As a recovering accountant, I feel mixed emotions with the end of tax season. I’m excited about the end of six-day workweeks, but I’ll miss the positive interactions I share with the low-income families I help through the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program in Philadelphia. Few experiences are as rewarding as seeing and hearing someone’s reaction when I tell them how much their refund will be.
Fortunately, I work on something else that I find incredibly fulfilling. So instead of saluting the end of tax season, I like to say that I’m celebrating a significant milestone in the production of How America Saves.1 We’ve wrapped up the analysis and sent the last of the copy and figures to marketing to work their magic.
While this is certainly a time to celebrate, it’s also a time I spend reflecting on the progress our plan participants are making toward their retirement goals. One bright spot is the improvement we can see in participant portfolio construction. Much of this improvement results from the widespread adoption of target-date funds (TDFs).
At the end of 2018, TDFs were offered to nearly all Vanguard plan participants—97% of our retirement savers had the option of using a TDF and 77% of all Vanguard participants were invested in TDFs.2 Most striking, and heartwarming for me, more than half of the participants we work with were solely invested in a single TDF. That’s 2.5 million retirement savers at Vanguard alone!
Regards,
Ted
https://vanguardinstitutionalblog.com/2019/05/28/tdf-adoption-sparks-evolution-in-portfolios-of-young-investors/
