Brett Hammond, of TIAA-CREF, spoke to employees about the new rules for investing during one of two Quarterly Market Updates sponsored by Duke Benefits during October.
Investing Time (and Money) in Retirement Accounts
Muir Dean, a clinical research contract associate in the School of Medicine, made a carefully calculated investment around her retirement funds last week: she took time to attend one of the Quarterly Market Updates, a pilot series sponsored by Duke Human Resources.
"I went into the session with the understanding that I would not understand it all," she said. "But I understood more than I thought I would, and it gave me a toehold into understanding more."
Dean attended the Oct. 26 talk by Jeff Tackett, Fidelity Investment's regional planning consultant, who shared his optimism about the market's signs of recovery, along with a caution about keeping investments diversified.
"Ideally, you want to have investments diversified enough that if some are going down, others are going up," Tackett said.
Dean said the session prompted her to set up a free session to review her retirement funds with Duke's onsite contact with Fidelity. "It is settling to hear people explain some of the information we hear on the news," she said.
As part of the series, Duke faculty and staff also heard from Brett Hammond, a representative from TIAA-CREF on Oct. 29. He discussed "the new rules for investing: Six principles for planning a safe and secure retirement" during that update. Hammond noted the importance of regularly reviewing investments to see what changes need to be made.
He said that although the message has been to look for investments with high returns, evidence shows that how much and how long one saves is just as important to growing retirement wealth.
"The old rule was, 'Returns are the key,' " he said. "The new rule is, 'You have to save to have savings.' "
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