Milken Conference 2024: Moving the Needle Toward Lifetime Financial Security

Hey, I'd like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and I'm proud to announce we're at Milken Global Conference 2024 in Beverly Hills, California, and I have Cheryl Evans. I'm welcoming Cheryl Evans back to the show. So first off, hey, Cheryl, just want to say welcome back. Thank you. Happy to be here with you. All right. So, so much to cover. It's been a year since we've seen each other last. The first time we met you were on the show. So I'm excited. Let's just start with this. Give me some updates. What's been going on over the last year? Yes. I'm the director of lifetime financial security at the Milken Institute. And I lead a program that focuses on ensuring that everyone is financially secure throughout their lives and into retirement. So it's a little more broad than retirement itself, but the biggest thing that we accomplished at a team is releasing a comprehensive research report, which can be found online. I'll give a little plug to that, which is. called Shifting the Retirement Paradigm, Moving Towards Lifetime Financial Security. We also issued an executive summary because it has 218 footnotes and it's quite long, but it's a comprehensive piece. It's comprehensive though. Yeah. That highlights. Most of the factors, not all that impact people's ability to be financially secure and things that could be policy changes, things that can make a difference. So we focus on things like inequity and savings. Women, we know save and people of color less. We start out with some statistics which are fairly daunting regarding, you know, the lack of saving overall in retirement vehicles, for example, about 25 percent of people are saving. At all for retirement. And then we have about 40 percent have access to an employee sponsored plan, which leaves a lot of people out. So that coupled with an aging population and longevity really pushed us to really think about, you know, creating this program that's been in existence for two years. So that report is extremely broad. It highlights things like FinTech solutions that are helping people to engage with finance state plans that are coming in what people are gig workers don't have. Retirement savings. So those type of things we focus on behavioral biases, people's inability to envision their future selves at what a young age. So they kind of are distant from that. So they don't save as early as they should policy considerations and many more. So it ends with. A list of considerations for people who are thinking about investing for the first time, like what things could you think about using your home as an asset, making sure you understand social security early. So there's a lot of factors that come into play when you think about people being financially secure. So that's the big thing that we've done. Yeah. We're also engaged with a number of financial firms, which was discussed today. We had a retirement CEO panel with the Sunda Brown Ducat from TIA, John Carter from Nationwide Financial, Penny Pennington from Edward Jones and Will Fuller from Transamerica. And we're engaged with a number of firms and dialogue and policy considerations on creating lifetime income. So in plan streams of income embedded in a 401k, giving anyone that, that income that you might get from a pension, but many people are most now aren't getting a pension. So we're doing that and we've doing a variety of things. We had a joint event with the EBRI, which is the employee benefit research Institute, which will be annual retirement symposium at the Kennedy center. And so we're doing a number of different things and speaking about the topic. And I just came off of a panel, our public panel. So not busy at all. No, so we're, we're doing a lot in this space and it's, I like the work very much because it's impactful. And as I said on our public panel, it cuts across all demographics and applies to everyone. The report that you mentioned how do, how do people access it? Like how is that? Yeah. It's a PDF on the Milken Institute website, but you can just literally type in Cheryl Evans shifting the retirement paradigm towards lifetime financial security and it will pull it up. It's online now. I know. And for everybody watching, just so you know, we'll put links to that in the show notes so that you can just click on the link and check it out. And so was there anything, obviously this is a big report, as you mentioned, knock a couple hundred foot notes. Was there anything that stuck out to you or like a surprise or just something that you were like, huh? Like one of those moments. There, there are a number of those. The thing that, that was the most surprising as we dug into the statistics on. Longer working lives. When you think about people who maybe haven't saved enough for retirement, the answer is universally among retirement experts to work longer. But there's a book called overtime by Beth Truesdale and another person whose name's left my head. I apolo

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