By Jonathan A. Knee; The New York Times ~ Jan 02, 2015

Feeling pleased that I had survived another year and the annual predictions of the apocalypse, I made the mistake of picking up “Falling Short: The Coming Retirement Crisis and What to Do About It” (Oxford University Press).

Written by Alicia H. Munnell, the director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, with Andrew D. Eschtruth, a colleague there, and Charles D. Ellis, a widely respected consultant and author, “Falling Short” does a fine job of clearly laying out the whats and whys of the impending crisis. It also provides a number of reasonable sounding alternative paths to avoiding financial Armageddon for the coming generations of seniors.

By Timothy W. Martin; The Wall Street Journal ~ Jan 02, 2015

For large corporate pensions, 2015 could not have come any sooner.

A new analysis by consulting firm Towers Watson estimates that the corporate pension deficit currently stands at $343 billion, more than double $162 billion it was at the end of 2013. Now, about 80% of pension funding is covered, down from 89% in 2013, Towers Watson says.

That means many companies will be forced to carry a higher pension expense this year, which could crimp investments in other areas or require cutbacks. Companies typically base their 2015 pension projections on the prior year’s performance.

Last year was a particularly hard year for corporate pensions and the widening deficit was driven by two key factors, said Alan Glickstein, Tower Watson’s senior retirement consultant, in a phone interview.

By Jeff Reeves, USA Today; KENS5 ~ Jan 01, 2015

As 2015 begins, it’s time for the annual deluge of tax forms – including 1098’s reporting mortgage interest or W-2’s from employers reporting your annual wages.

But while gathering documents for the past year’s taxes is important, equally pressing is the need to adjust your budget to account for changes in the tax code that take effect starting on New Year’s Day.

After all, you have been paying taxes and making retirement contributions all year even though taxes don’t need to be filed until the following April. While there are a handful of last-minute strategies to play catch up on 2014 tax obligations, the sad reality is that many folks who have waited until now to think about their taxes are too late.

By Jeffrey Scott Shapiro; The Washington Times ~ Dec 29, 2014

The United Food and Commercial Workers Union is a heavyweight on the labor scene. It pays its president $350,000 a year. It’s holding its next executive board meeting in February at a swanky beachfront resort in Hollywood, Florida. And it just doled out nearly $8 million to influence the last election and lobby Washington.

But when it comes to standing by the obligation unions made to provide pensions to retirees, UFCW pleaded poverty in persuading Congress to let chronically underfunded union pension plans cut the benefits of workers, including those already retired.

“Declining participation and factors like the Great Recession have created a new reality for Taft-Hartley multiemployer plans wherein many of them are substantially underfunded,” departing UFCW President Joseph T. Hansen wrote to the House Education and the Workforce Committee in a letter this month.

By Natalie Burg; Forbes ~ Dec 29, 2014

Reliable Production Machining and Welding has survived recessions, strikes and rising fuel prices since opening some 70 years ago in the basement of a casket maker.

But according to a report in business publication Inc., the Indiana-based company didn’t face its toughest crisis until 2008, when health insurance costs for its 162 employees rose 25 percent to $750,000 in just two years.

Reliable’s story is not an isolated one, and the days of leaving healthcare reform solely to the public and healthcare sectors are over. According to a Harris Poll commissioned by Castlight Health, approximately 90 percent of chief financial officers surveyed agreed they could invest more in their businesses if their company’s healthcare costs were lower. The effect on the American business sector is clear: Rising healthcare costs are hurting the enterprise.

By Dan Ritter; Wall St. Cheat Sheet ~ Dec 28, 2014

A retirement is probably the single largest and most valuable purchase most people will make in their lives, and — fortunately or unfortunately — you generally can’t take out a mortgage or a loan to finance it. This is why those who find themselves well-positioned for comfortable living come the age of retirement are generally the same people who, at the beginning of their working tenure, formed a retirement plan and faithfully executed it.

That is no small task. Nearly half of working-age American households have nothing or next to nothing saved for retirement. As John Bogle, founder of the Vanguard Group, has observed, the three pillars of the American retirement system — Social Security, the defined-benefit plan, and the defined-contribution plan — are all in terrible shape. In a 2012 report, Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) observed that Americans are running a collective retirement deficit of $6.6 trillion.

By Josh Zumbrun; The Wall Street Journal ~ Dec 26, 2014

The very rich often live in expensive houses, but that’s not where most of their wealth is.

In fact, for the wealthiest 1% of Americans, only about 9% of their total net worth is tied up in their home. That’s compared to 63% for the broad middle class.

That’s among the revealing findings of research, released earlier this month, from Edward Wolff, an economist at New York University who studies the wealth distribution. His work analyzed the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances to peek into the widely differing portfolios of the wealthiest 1%, the next 19%, which can be loosely thought of as the upper middle class (though the top of this range is getting very wealthy as well), and the middle 60%, or the broad middle class.

By Carol Wilson; Light Reading ~ Dec 23, 2014

AT&T is counting on “disruptive” vendors and the open source community as it works to transform its internal culture as a key part of the SDN/NFV transformation, says one of its top technology executives.

Andre Fuetsch, senior VP of architecture and design for AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) and the man John Donovan says is overseeing the architecture for AT&T’s next-gen network, admits up front that culture change is critical to the success of AT&T’s move to a software-centric network — as described by Donovan in his blog here. (See AT&T Touts SDN Push, Seeks Talent.)

By Elinor Comlay; Reuters ~ Dec 22, 2014

MEXICO CITY, Dec 21 (Reuters) – Mexico’s telecom watchdog on Sunday approved AT&T Inc’s $1.7 billion purchase of local cellphone company Iusacell, with unspecified conditions, a statement said.

The Federal Institute of Telecommunications said it set conditions on the deal to “avoid risks to the process of competition” in markets where Iusacell would compete with Carlos Slim’s America Movil, which previously counted AT&T as a minority investor.

America Movil is Mexico’s biggest mobile operator, while Iusacell is a distant third.

By Rodney Brooks; USA TODAY ~ Dec 22, 2014

Last November, the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging launched a special fraud hotline to help deal with the “epidemic” of fraud and scams targeting older Americans and retirees. In the months since, the committee staff says it has responded to more than 1,900 reports of fraud affecting seniors. On Friday, the committee released its bipartisan report on the common types of fraud reported to the hotline.

USA TODAY retirement columnist Rodney Brooks asked Committee Chairman Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., about the problem and the report.

Q: Tell me about the committee hearings that led up to this report. What is the problem, and how big is it?