Data & Research August 23, 2007

Study: Advisers Helped with 67% of IRA Rollovers

Two-thirds (67%) of individuals who rolled a balance over to a personal IRA did so using a professional adviser, says a new report from Spectrem Group.
Reported by

“In conjunction with the end of the bear market earlier in the decade, participants – especially those with balances of $100,000 or more – have clearly become more willing to roll assets over. This presents new opportunities for providers and advisers,” said George H. Walper, Jr., President of Spectrem Group, in a press release about the report, “The IRA Rollover Market 2007.”

According to the report, the IRA rollover market grew by 38% from 2004 to 2007, rebounding from an 11% decline in assets rolled over from 2000 to 2004.

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Assets rolled over from other retirement accounts, primarily savings plans such as 401(k)s and 403(b)s, to IRAs in 2007 stood at $489.3 billion, up from $353.4 billion in 2004, the Spectrem research found.

The number of individuals conducting IRA rollovers has also increased, up 28% to 7.4 million in 2007 from 5.8 million in 2004, the press release said. From 2000 to 2004, the number of individuals conducting rollovers fell 9%, from 6.4 million to 5.8 million.

The report can be purchased by contacting Spectrem Group at (312) 382-8284, or by visiting www.spectrem.com.

Diversions August 22, 2007

Generation Gaps

They have never rolled down a car window, never known a time when the Berlin Wall stood, and never seen anyone but Jay Leno host the Tonight Show.
Reported by
No, we’re not talking about hermits, or some kind of Austin Powers secret agent cryogenically frozen in 1967. We’re talking about the class of 2011—the freshmen that have, or soon will, arrive on college campuses in the upcoming weeks.
Their perspective has once again been captured by Beloit College in Wisconsin, which has for the past decade released the Beloit College Mindset List. Its 70 items provide a look at the cultural touchstones that have shaped the lives of today’s first-year students, most of them born in 1989. It is the creation of Beloit’s Keefer Professor of the Humanities, Tom McBride, and Public Affairs Director Ron Nief.
Latchkey kids for most of their lives, students entering college this fall think nothing of arriving home alone; and, these days, they accept as normal discourse e-mailing or texting their friends, and updating their summer vacation exploits on “Facebook’ or “MySpace,’ (a word of insight—if you want to keep up with what is REALLY going on with your teenager, get an account on one of those two social networks).
For the incoming freshman class, Humvees (minus the artillery) have always been available to the public, they have grown up with bottled water, and General Motors has always been working on an electric car. Food packaging has always included nutritional labeling.
“Off the hook’ has never had anything to do with a telephone, and music has always been “unplugged.’ Meanwhile, MTV has never featured music videos, U2 has always been more than a spy plane—and this group was too young to understand Judas Priest’s subliminal messages.
Wolf Blitzer has always been serving up the news on CNN, Fox has always been a major network, and Time has always worked with Warner. They learned about JFK from Oliver Stone and Malcolm X from Spike Lee, and virtual reality has always been available when the real thing failed.
You can find the full list—and lists from previous years—at http://www.beloit.edu/~pubaff/mindset

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