Age Makes You Happier – And Poorer

Avoidance Strategies

As the years pass I've noticed I'm increasingly unwilling to expose myself to sources of negative information or emotional stress. So news bulletins, soap operas and anything a film critic might regard as emotionally engaging are increasingly off-limits. Frankly I'd rather watch Guardians of the Galaxy than Moonlight, no matter how worthy the latter.

Slightly to my surprise it turns out that this isn't just me being more than normally antisocial, but is a commonly observed age-related change in preferences. By choice older people will habitually avoid stuff that they find negative. Which goes a long way to explaining a lot of things, including why older nuns tend to be happier and why we should avoid having to do anything difficult – like thinking or active investment – after we've reached 70.

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Investing In Our Children

Live Long and Prosper

Statistically, a child born today is more likely to reach 100 than someone who is already 96 years old. And this is happening at a time when government resources are increasingly stretched and retirement ages are creeping upwards, when the populations of the developed nations are aging and the borders are increasingly closed to younger people from poorer countries.

As parents the one thing we can do for our children, to prepare them for this dystopian future, is give them the skills they need to survive and, hopefully, prosper. And chief of those skills, in a world dominated by the ideology we call capitalism, is a proper understanding of how to manage money: because the alternative is that money will manage them.

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The Dangerously Miasmic Myth of a 4% Safe Withdrawal Rate

Miasma

One – rare – area where academic economic research intersects with the interests of private investors is on the topic of Safe Withdrawal Rates – the maximum amount you can safely withdraw from your investment pot each year following retirement. Opinion is divided on exactly how much is safe, but the general consensus is somewhere in the region of 4%.

Of course this is utter baloney. As usual, when academic analysis meets commonsense understanding it creates a perfect miasma of miscomprehension and, no doubt, bad retirement planning. Your safe withdrawal rate is dependent on you, not on some mythical, half-baked rule of thumb.

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Sapir-Whorf Economics: Your Language Predicts Your Future

A Resumption

Apologies for the recent temporary hiatus, been rather busy with that strange thing called real life.  More regular updates from now on but, for a while, they'll be more limited than in the past due to the need to fulfil a book contract.  Still, it’ll be something to add to the Christmas wishlist.

So … let’s look at something really odd, and why, if you’re a useless procrastinator  you should really want to learn German.  It seems that cultural stereotyping may not be quite so irrational as we may have thought …

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Be Kind To An Old Person – Start With Yourself

No One Will Care When You’re Old

Around the globe governments  struggling with budget deficits have been making sure that they target the true villains of the financial crisis. Admittedly, it's slightly surprising that treasury ministers seem to have decided that their money problems weren’t caused by errant and badly incentivised bankers but by old age pensioners rushing about terrorising people with their zimmer frames and incontinence bags.

The evidence is clear – low interest rates and high underlying rates of inflation disadvantage people who aren’t in paid employment, while the increasing focus on raising state pension ages and restricting government health spending clearly impacts old people more than young. This is all a bit odd, you might think, but is perfectly rational from the perspective of politicians. Something for the young to remember – no one will care when you get old, so you'd better start thinking of your future self, whoever they are.

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The Secret of a Healthy, Wealthy Life

Infantile People

People, we know, generally aren’t very good with money. They don’t save enough, are inclined to procrastinate over saving for the distant future and are easily induced to splash out for instant gratification using the plastic. All of which has led psychologists and governments to start trying to use psychology to manipulate citizen’s behaviour in their own best interests.

Yet what’s interesting is that there is a small, but significant, group of people who overcome these problems with apparent ease. Not only are they better with money but they’re more likely to form lasting relationships, avoid criminal convictions and annoy everyone with their all round smugness. What’s even more interesting is that there’s a simple way of picking out these people from the age of four: and all you need is a couple of marshmallows.

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A Yen For Yield: Redux

Uncertainty On the Brink

Following on from A Yen For Yield we’re left with the rather odd position that a quest for yield through investing in higher yielding, but risky, assets seems quite at odds with the possibility of a deflationary environment where risky assets are likely to valued downwards. This is what comes of looking at behaviour as well as economics.

The underlying problem is uncertainty. No matter what anyone tells you, no one knows exactly what tomorrow will bring. And, in particular, if you stand on the brink of retirement that means no second chances if you get things wrong.

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A Yen For Yield

Retirement Nirvana Postponed

As countries have squashed their interest rates down over the past few years it's had the nasty consequence for millions of people approaching retirement of pushing back that nirvana of non-working bliss ever further into the future. By attempting to stimulate economies, by turning the lenders of last resort in free money machines, annuity rates – the interest received on retirement pots – have fallen, often quite dramatically.

When this happened in Japan the net effect was an extraordinary quest for a higher income in the most unlikely of places. Now, as the irrestistable force of the Boomer population moves inexorably into its retirement and is faced with the unmoveable object of yields on their investments that wouldn’t feed and clothe an anorexic sparrow on a crash diet, we’re likely to see yet another set of equally unintended consequences. If you want a trend to follow then don't bother with gold: look for yield.

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Jam Today – Tyranny Tomorrow?

Tyranny of Choice

One of the most famous experiments in social science published this century was on jam, or at least the impact of having more or less types of jam to choose from. This research, by Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper, in When Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing, suggested that consumers are often paralysed by choice.

By extrapolating from what was originally a pretty limited study researchers have created a whole new industry out of reducing the number of options for people to select from. Of course, that leads to the next tricky question – which is who decides what should be available, and to whom?

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A Sideways Look At … Retirement

Retirement on the Psy-Fi Blog

For one reason or another retirement has figured large on PSB over the past few months. It’s probably my fixation about retirement being the main objective of stockmarket investing for most people. The idea of getting old is bad enough without the thought of being poor as well. Although on the bright side you can pretend to be deaf and then be rude to people all you like.

Anyway, here’s a brief summary of the Psy-Fi Blog’s thoughts on retirement …

Old? Prudent? You’ve Been Bilked!

The sheer scale and effrontery of the banks’ reactions to government bail-outs are enough to drive anyone to outright sarcasm …

“In fact it’s only non-working savers who will lose out and let’s face it, they don’t have much say in the matter anyway. It’s a small price to pay that we’re taking from the prudent to bail out the profligate but frankly most of these people are quite old and would probably have died quite soon anyway.” >> Read More

Of course, providing you don’t eat very much, don’t require heating or shelter and can avoid healthcare costs you’ll probably be OK. Here in the UK we’re preparing to legalise euthanasia. This is almost certainly a coincidence. Probably.

The basic demographics of developed nations virtually guarantees that some nasty decisions lie ahead. Of course we can always agree to allow more immigration to pick up the slack of absent taxpayers. That’s always popular with electorates.

The End of the Age of Retirement

When Otto von Bismark introduced pensions it was on the understanding that most people would die before they got one. Unfortunately people promptly decided that if they were going to be paid to be old then they’d hang about to do so. That’s not quite so stupid as it sounds – there’s good evidence that people manage to delay their deaths to benefit from taxation changes.

Anyway, the average lifespan of a male in London in 1900 was only about 40, now it’s nearly double that. State pension schemes paying out today’s taxes to today’s pensioners are bust if you look at future liabilities. Future pension and healthcare benefits can’t possibly match the expectations of the middle aged and may not even see the already retired through safely. Pension ages are already increasing …

“For those of us in middle age there’s at least some time to take note of the demographic trends and prepare ourselves. Assuming that we’ll retire at Bismarck’s 65, pick up inflation protected benefits and be able to sell our houses for enough money to fund a golden age of cruises, holiday homes and golf club memberships isn’t very wise. Doing some sensible paying down of debt and investing in the stockmarket in a way that will guarantee capturing the maximum returns for the minimum risk is a better bet. ” >> Read More

The only problem with this being that most people are more likely to chase the latest investing trend and lose their savings in hopeless gambles than they are to invest safely. In fact most people will simply fail to make a decision at all because it’s all too difficult. Usually they’ll go off and spend their retirement savings on some new clothes and a nice holiday rather than thinking about retirement.

Retirees, Procrastinate At Your Peril

The art of not making a decision, choosing short-term pleasure over long term gains and generally operating on the basis of tomorrow never coming is pretty much the status quo when it comes to retirement planning. Most people simply don’t get around to doing it because it’s not fun. Those who do often fail because they can’t decide what to do for the best, give up and go bowling instead:

“The odd, but inevitable conclusion, from this research is that when figuring out what to do about the tricky business of retirement investing people may never get around to doing it because it’s too important. It’s hard to know what’s worse – a mass of pleasure seeking, live for the moment hedonists ignoring their retirement problems because of lack of self-control or the responsible and thoughtful folks who are paralysed by analysis.” >> Read More

Time to call for an expert advisor?

Disclosure Won’t Stop A Conflicted Advisor

Well, sadly not. Advisors only give unbiased advice if you pay them directly and most people don’t want to pay them at all. Advisors paid by commission on the products they sell will sell you the wrong thing. If they tell you that they get commission on the products they’ll do even worse stuff.

“Possibly the biggest problem, however, is that a disclosure of a conflict of interest by an expert often requires an expert to evaluate it. If you go to a doctor about a difficult medical problem and the physician tells you that you need an expensive drug but that she’s being paid by the pharmaceutical industry to plug it how do you respond? Does this disclosure help you make the decision or not?

Well, not, as it happens.” >> Read More

So trusting advisors isn’t usually a good option, either. Perhaps we should learn how to invest for ourselves – better get some training.

Financial Education Doesn’t Work

Only, it turns out, we’re awful at learning about finance. When we do learn anything we usually end up drawing the wrong conclusions:
 

There is one type of training that does seem to improve the situation – the so-called stockmarket game in which students actively participate in their learning approach. This produces a 6 to 8% improvement. Researchers seem to be puzzled by why this might be the case but there’s plenty of psychological research around that shows how active involvement in learning situations improves student ability to use the training afterwards.

Regardless, the stockmarket game success turns out to be a pyrrhic victory because the successful students then go on to save less  than their peers. The (unsubstantiated) hypothesis is that they learn that they can make up for failing to save by taking additional risks on the markets. Which is of course, what happens when you treat people like lab rats – they figure out how to get the cheese for as little effort as possible: proponents of ‘Nudge’ techniques beware. >> Read More

In fact the only thing that does seem to work is abandoning your sense of responsibility by opting out of the decision altogether.

Save More … Tomorrow

Yes, it’s been shown that the people who save most are the people who make a decision up front and then refuse to think about it. Being inherently lazy and utterly bored by the topic if we decide to invest an ever-increasing percentage of our salary in our pensions, increasing as our salaries increase, then we end up saving more than pretty much anyone else. It’s a rare case of behavioural finance actually helping us rather than pointing out exactly how stupid we are. Unfortunately there are likely to be downsides:
 

“As the same article points out, however, there is a problem in using these methods. We know that they work but we don’t know exactly why. And therein lies an issue, because when we nudge people in one direction we’re likely to find that although we may get the desired outcome, we may also cause them to do other things we don’t expect: consumers who save more for retirement in automatic schemes will be consuming less and buying fewer financial products, for instance.” >> Read More

It Ain’t What You Save, It’s What You Do With It

Of course, many people will argue it’s what you do with your savings that matters, rather than the amount you save. Sadly the evidence is not on their side. The vast majority of people who try to think their way through the thicket of the investment jungle end up doing worse than a cross-eyed monkey armed with a set of darts and a copy of the Wall Street Journal.

Although, of course, the monkey’s more likely to use the paper for other purposes than investment. Still, that’s true intrinsic value for you …

Save More … Tomorrow

Stop Lecturing, Start Helping

The investment maze we need to navigate gets ever more difficult. We’ve seen that investment advisors are unconsciously biased against us (Disclosure Won’t Stop A Conflicted Advisor) and that financial training isn’t much help (Financial Education Doesn’t Work). We’ve been told that long term passive investing in stocks is a bad idea (40 Years Of Bonds Beating Equities) and worst of all we can’t even trust ourselves, because we’re likely to goof off rather than spend time managing our investments (Retirees, Procrastinate At Your Peril).

All told, it’s not a happy situation for the majority of people who’d like a comfortable financial future. Given that behavioural biases are inadvertently responsible for many of the problems that beset us it would be nice if the psychologists stopped telling us what’s going wrong and came up with some useful suggestions. As it turns out they’re already on the case, the only problem being that we don’t, such is the law of unintended consequences, have a clue what the result of this intervention will be.

Positive and Negative Freedom

Mostly free market democracies like to offer free market democratic solutions to problems. The invisible hand of the market is presumed, all other things being equal, to find the best possible solution in a world of difficult trade-offs. The least good solution is usually regulation that seeks to make people behave in their own best interests.

This “least good” option isn’t simply rhetoric. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin elaborated the concepts of Positive and Negative Freedom in his lecture Two Concepts of Liberty. Positive Freedom is the freedom to do whatever we want as long as it doesn’t harm anyone else. Negative Freedom is the freedom that comes from being compelled to act in our own best interests – think fluoride in drinking water, DNA databases to catch future perps or forced retirement savings.

Unfortunately if you give a legislator an opportunity they’ll start doing what they think they do best – introducing more and more laws to protect us. Here in the UK we’re wilting under a plethora of Health and Safety regulations and Anti-Terrorism laws that are intended to save us from nasty things and horrible people. In consequence these regulations are simultaneously depriving us of many of our traditional freedoms and rights: this may be inevitable, but the creep of Negative Freedom is not without its dangers.

Berlin was one of the twentieth century’s more passionate advocates for Positive Freedom. As he pointed out, the century’s more despicable dictators rose to power on a wave of regulations which ended in coercion and dictatorship. Loosely fettered capitalism is a heady bulwark against such trends but the actions of financial engineers over the past decade have placed these freedoms in doubt.

Forcing Retirement Saving

In such an environment it’s unsurprising that the idea of coercing people into saving for their own retirements has become popular. If people won’t voluntarily do what’s in their best interests then we should make them is, in essence, the argument. The difficulty is, of course, that coercing people into effectively taking a salary cut isn’t a universally popular idea so governments have tended to put off the decision in favour of more enjoyable activities like spending the next generation’s tax revenues to ensure that bankers get paid their bonuses in the US or making sure politicians can afford homes for their ducks in the UK. Never let it be said that Britain’s global ambitions have waned since the end of Empire.

Fortunately behavioural psychology has come to the rescue of our conflicted leaders with useful evidence showing that turkeys can be made to vote for Christmas or Thanksgiving just as long as you make sure that their attendance at the ceremonial dinner is the default option. Government advisors are all over this idea, as you can probably imagine.

Default Options Work

Leaving aside the questionable issues of freedom and coercion for the time being, the idea of making people elect out of things they might otherwise choose not to do is a trick commercial companies have been using for years, as the heap of pseudo-junk marketing mail that arrives by snail mail and email each week is testament to. In terms of retirement savings, however, the idea of making the default option something to be automatically opted in to has been shown to have a positive effect on scheme enrolment.

The problem is that this is a one-off intervention. Simply agreeing to invest a fixed value or even a fixed percentage of your salary each month may not be sufficient, especially if the starting amount is small. The ideas of Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein are at the heart of many of the new initiatives, sparked by their popular book Nudge, which explains how people’s behavioural biases can be used to persuade them to act in their own best interests.

Save More Tomorrow

Thaler’s already shown that these ideas can be put into effective practice through his Save More Tomorrow(tm) scheme. In this he and Schlomo Benartzi have neatly used a number of biases to persuade people to behave better. The design of the scheme is simple: when people enrol they agree that as and when they receive salary rises the amount subscribed to their retirement savings is automatically incremented, by an amount that grows in percentage terms.

This may not sound like much but the impact is remarkable. In the initial study there were two groups – one group that agreed to contribute a higher percentage earnings to start with and who needed to make further decisions to invest more and a second group with lower initial investments but which had agreed – by failing to opt out of the option – to contribute a rising percentage of their future salary rises. Three years and four rises later the Save More Tomorrow(tm) group was contributing significantly more than their counterparts.

What the scheme is doing is taking advantage of a number of behavioural traits that normally militate against long-term savings. Firstly there’s inertia – the tendency to let the status quo continue. So once opted in most people can’t be bothered to opt out. Secondly this overcomes the effects of lack of self control and procrastination – the tendency to prefer short-term immediate rewards over longer-term, uncertain ones. Thirdly there’s loss aversion – people don’t like seeing a cut in their take home pay. The scheme overcomes this because when a salary rise occurs people still see more money in their wage packet so they don’t suffer the disappointment of ‘losing’ money by opting to save it.

Nudge, Nudge

These concepts have got government advisors everywhere busily figuring out how they can ‘nudge’ people in the direction of current policy. There’s plenty of evidence that default options work – as noted in this fascinating recent Undercover Economist article the organ donor base varies by nearly 80% between the culturally similar Austria and Germany: Austria requires citizens to opt out, Germany to opt in.

As the same article points out, however, there is a problem in using these methods. We know that they work but we don’t know exactly why. And therein lies an issue, because when we nudge people in one direction we’re likely to find that although we may get the desired outcome, we may also cause them to do other things we don’t expect: consumers who save more for retirement in automatic schemes will be consuming less and buying fewer financial products, for instance.

Be Careful What You Wish For

We may think these are generally desirable outcomes but we don’t know what the effect will be of governments globally nudging their citizens in any particular way. We need to be careful what we wish for. This isn’t a new idea – Thaler and Sunstein have addressed the issue in Libertarian Paternalism is Not an Oxymoron. Here they argue that guiding people to better decisions by using their behavioural weaknesses against them is morally justified.

Isaiah Berlin would probably have disagreed, seeing any form of coercion as the thin end of a long wedge. If we could keep the areas of application of these ideas limited – to retirement savings opt-ins and healthy food choices, for instance – then maybe this would be OK. Unfortunately, the chances of governments limiting their interference to such straightforwardly uncontroversial areas is minimal. Look out for automatic opt-in clauses with everything – after all, it’s all in our best possible interests.


Related Articles: The End of The Age of Retirement, Investors, Embrace Your Feminine Side, O Investor Why Art Thou Rational?

Retirees, Procrastinate At Your Peril

Fun or Future Famine

Given a choice between doing something light-hearted and fun which brings immediate gratification or something boring and difficult that won’t pay off for decades – if ever – most of us wouldn’t find it very difficult to make a choice. In fact we’re probably designed to operate this way, since the probability of surviving long enough to enjoy our future wasn’t very great for most of human history.

Now, however, things are different. In the developed world most of us are going to live long past our sell-by dates. Which means our in-built tendency to prevaricate over the tricky, boring and very long-term problem of preparing for retirement is an issue that most of us can’t afford to put off a day longer. If we’re to avoid eking out our dwindling days in destitution we need to stop procrastinating, pronto.

Hyperbolic Discounting

Procrastination is the technical term for the preference of pleasure today over pleasure tomorrow. It’s been the subject of considerable research because the failure of tomorrow’s pensioners to plan for their old-age is a major concern for governments. They’d rather not have to deal at all with old people who don’t pay any taxes and who are a burden on healthcare services, but when they haven’t got any savings they’re worse than a nuisance as they tend to moan a lot and generally vote the wrong way.

One of the odder impacts of procrastination is the effect of time as captured by something called hyperbolic discounting utility. Generally people will take $100 today over $110 tomorrow but would rather have $110 in twenty one days over $100 in twenty. Of course, when the days count down and day 20 becomes today they reverse their preferences. This is profoundly irrational because over such short periods the risk of not being paid is minimal.

Paying Through The Nose

Our desire for short-term gratification and our inability to properly calculate the cost of money allows companies to make heaps of profits out of us. Pretty well anything that enables us to get what we want today without paying for it until tomorrow is enough to get us hooked. So offers of instant credit by stores gets people buying on the never-never like there’s no tomorrow. Only there is, and when it comes we pay through the nose.

Of course, the counter argument is that people should show more self-restraint and that our consumer oriented economy is at fault. The evidence, sadly, is that self-restraint is the exception, not the norm, and people like consuming: it stimulates the limbic centres of the brain and makes them feel happy. Extreme shopaholics have to be treated by drugs targeting these areas, such is the addiction issue.

Hedonism Versus Inertia

Stores aren’t the only beneficiaries of our short-term hedonistic ways. Credit card companies are well known for offering low or zero teaser interest rates to get people to switch, only to rack up the fees later on. The huge impact of the short-term is shown again by research which demonstrates that people will go for the lowest possible initial rate even if offered a better deal with a slightly higher starting rate.

The credit card transfer effect is, in fact, a war between two competing tendencies – short-term pleasure seeking and basic inertia. The rates have to be so good because otherwise we just can’t be bothered to change our ways. Banks habitually take advantage of this by offering zero interest on checking accounts and higher interest savings accounts. No matter how easy it is to transfer funds we generally don’t bother doing so, presumably because we’re out shopping and filling in credit card applications.

The list goes on: preferential insurance rates for new customers, payday loans, mortgage protection policies and extended warranties for instance. The latter two products capitalise on another psychological trait, by the way: the tendency to not worry about small add-on costs when you’ve just made a large purchase. That’s why a salesperson will always sell you a suit first and the accessories afterwards – when compared to the large upfront cost of the expensive suit it’s relatively easy to sell other items afterwards because we anchor on the big number. Suits you, sir.

Retirement Planning Isn’t Pleasant

However, the problem of procrastination goes way beyond the simple issue of instant gratification versus delayed pleasure. Whenever we decide to do something we implicitly decide not to do other things. Even more, we need to decide which tasks to devote time to and which to simply skim over. More difficult and less pleasurable tasks – such as planning how to save money for retirement – are likely to find themselves at the bottom of the list. If they get done at all procrastination will tend to ensure that they’re done inadequately: so retirement planning defaults to what someone who knows a friend who’s consulted an advisor is doing.

Anyway, it’s doubtful if most people can figure out how much they need to retire on. Take Harry Markowitz, the inventor of modern portfolio theory. Did he analyse the co-variances of the various asset classes available to him to figure out an efficient frontier in order to design a portfolio optimised to give him the best return for the lowest risk?

Did he heck.

He did what most people do and split up his contributions equally between the available asset classes. However, there’s a lesson here as well. Better a roughly right decision made quickly than a perfect solution that takes a decade to implement. The time to act is now. Always.

Dumb, Dumber and Poor

As ever in finance financial biases are most damaging to those people with less understanding of the problem area. Procrastination is no different. So reasonably aware and switched on investors are less likely to delay sorting out their finances. As O’Donaghue and Rabin have shown, even relatively low levels of problems with self-control can cause naive investors to avoid the issue completely. It falls in the class of “too hard” so they never get round to dealing with it.

But it gets worse (of course it does, this is the Psy-Fi Blog). Understandably people are more likely to procrastinate over important issues than minor ones. So, for instance, someone may decide to sort out their retirement savings issue but then be unable to complete the task because they’re presented with too many options. Fear of getting things wrong may mean that they end up doing nothing.

The researchers argue that three factors interact to determine whether or not procrastination takes place – self control or lack thereof, domain knowledge or a similar lack thereof and the range of possible options. Even people with good knowledge and exemplary self control may end up dithering if presented with too large a range of options. And, to cap the issue, the more important an issue is, the more procrastination is likely. So investing $100,000 is likely to prove harder than investing $10,000. Although presumably spending it wouldn’t provoke the same level of cognitive dissonance.

Paralysis By Analysis

The odd, but inevitable conclusion, from this research is that when figuring out what to do about the tricky business of retirement investing people may never get around to doing it because it’s too important. It’s hard to know what’s worse – a mass of pleasure seeking, live for the moment hedonists ignoring their retirement problems because of lack of self-control or the responsible and thoughtful folks who are paralysed by analysis.

The answer to this appears to be one that sits uncomfortably with democratic, free market ideals – to use our behavioural biases to coerce people into doing what’s best for themselves. Whether you agree with it or not the evidence is clear: if we don’t help people help themselves then we’re looking at a grim future for millions of dumpster diving pensioners. The alternative may be waking up to find a granny in your garbage.


Related Articles: It’s Not Different This Time, The End of the Age of Retirement, Don’t Lose Money in the Stupid Corner

The End of the Age of Retirement

Bismarck’s Pension Policy

In 1889 Otto von Bismarck’s German government introduced the first old age pension scheme providing retirement benefits to people over 70, later reduced to 65. The aim of this wasn’t to provide a deserved holiday for old folks at the end of their lives but to ensure a safety net for those made incapable of working by the disabilities of extreme age. At the time the average Prussian lived to 45.

Since then, while lifespans have increased and the likelihood of illness in early retirement has declined, the retirement age hasn’t changed. In the developed world, where the most generous pension entitlements are offered, bitter demographic reality will soon see the end of the Age of Retirement: the idea that people stopped work and had a holiday before they died will one day seem like a curious feature of our peculiar times.

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