Getting rich in America depends on a lot more than a college degree-By Victoria Stilwell

Factors like family background, inheritances and health are playing an increasing role

With graduation season around the corner, more than a few U.S. families are probably wondering just how much that college degree will be worth.

There's little doubt education is associated with higher income, better financial decision-making and more wealth. However, issues that are harder for an individual to control -- what type of family you come from, whether you get an inheritance, or how healthy you are -- also play a growing role in determining your net worth, according to a new report by researchers William Emmons and Bryan Noeth at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
Education "is important, but it's not the whole story," Emmons, a senior economic adviser at the St. Louis Fed, said in an interview.  "You can't simply send everyone to college and expect to solve all the social problems that we have, including problems in the job market."
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Family background, such as your parents' social class, occupation, education and income, also has a hand in wealth-building, Emmons and Noeth found. Wellness can play a role because people who are fit can work longer and incur fewer health-care expenses in retirement. There is also what sociologists call ``assortative mating,'' or the tendency of highly educated people to marry each other.
The bottom line is that these other influences help translate income into wealth. The result is a growing gap between the net worth of more- and less-educated families even as the disparity in income stays fairly constant. The following chart depicts the wealth-to-income ratios of households led by someone 40 years old or older with various amounts of education. The rate shows how easily a family can turn earnings into net worth.
"Increasing the educational attainment alone of an individual or group is unlikely to result in all of the positive effects that are hallmarks of families with advanced education," the researchers wrote in the paper. "Some important contributors to the economic and financial success of many highly educated people cannot be granted along with a degree."

While the U.S. has taken strides to make going to college more accessible, the financial outcomes of those who don't get additional schooling have deteriorated. That means if four years at a university isn't a good fit for you, your economic picture has gotten bleaker.

The median net worth of families headed by high school graduates was $95,072 in 2013, down 36 percent from $149,182 in 1989 after adjusting for inflation, according to data from the Survey of Consumer Finances. By comparison, wealth levels for families with graduate or professional degrees rose 45 percent to $689,100 over the same period.

"More of the people who have the potential to go to college are going to college today," Emmons said. "But the flip-side is that for those who don't go to college, their opportunities look much less promising in this narrow financial sense."
This made me think of my 70-year-old uncle, who lives in western North Carolina. He didn't finish high school, but was still able to work for a railroad his entire life and generate a solid, stable income stream for his family. He bought land, built a home, helped his son through college and is now enjoying retirement. Scenarios like that are becoming increasingly rare, Emmons said, because "the job opportunities are not there."
The odds of becoming millionaires for a family headed by someone 40 or older without a high school diploma were 1 in 110 in 2013, according to Emmons and Noeth's calculations. That compares to 1 in 2.6 for a family headed by someone with a graduate or professional degree.
Moreover, much of the educational attainment in the U.S. is concentrated among white and Asian households, adding a racial filter to the issue. At the graduate-and professional-degree level, only Asians have shown a strong upward trend in educational attainment, while blacks and Hispanics, who will be responsible for much of the U.S. population growth in the coming years, still trail other races at every schooling level.
Gender differences are also at work, with women of every race and ethnicity passing their male counterparts at each education milestone, Emmons and Noeth find. This is problematic considering that women have lower labor force participation rates and have yet to reach pay parity with their male colleagues.
"The continuing barriers facing women in fully contributing to their families’ and the economy’s progress, together with the rising share of the black and Hispanic population with very low education levels, make it likely that educational advances will contribute less to economic and financial growth in the future than they have in recent decades," Emmons and Noeth wrote.


Culled from Bloomberg

Plan your retirement- Odunze Reginald C

Photo credited to 10xfinancial.ca

Experience has shown that nearly most businesses owned both the rich and the poor all fizzled out following the death of the bread winner or the owner of the business.

According to research also most family members are also enmeshed in family squabbles over who takes over the estates of the deceased especially if he dies interstate. So what happens if the deceased do not bequeath anything to a family member?  Will they decide not to bury the deceased , what about if the deceased willed all his or assets to charity. What will the family members do?  And even when the family member that dies has no will, there is that squabble between the relations  and the wife and children of the deceased, as there is unwritten maxim in Africa that the relations of the deceased has been before the coming of the wife and children of the deceased.

This calls for self awakening and a deliberate programme and strategies in ensuring your own successful retirement devoid of family input.

There are steps to achieving that and according to Wall Street cheat sheet “TCRS offers the following three strategic steps for achieving retirement readiness and success:

1. Save for retirement. Start saving as early as possible — and as much as possible to maximize potential compounding of investments. Save consistently over time. Avoid taking loans and early withdrawals from retirement accounts as they can severely inhibit the growth of long-term retirement savings.
2. Calculate retirement savings needs, develop a retirement strategy, and write it down. In creating a plan, consider lifestyle, living expenses, healthcare needs, government benefits, and other factors, as well as a backup plan in case retirement comes early due to an unforeseen circumstance.
3. Get educated about retirement investing. Whether relying on the expertise of professional advisers or taking a more do-it-yourself approach, gain the knowledge to ask questions and make informed decisions. Seek assistance from a professional financial adviser, if needed.” (Wall street cheat sheet)

What we are trying to say is that every human being should endeavor to put in place measures towards achieving a successful retirement during old age and not look upon family estates as a means to survival.

Putting a hope on family estates and parent retirement pot portrays a lack of confidence among family members and in most extreme cases built up of  hatred, murder, kidnap and other vices that the love for money can aggravate. And according to Kiyosaki “the world of money is filled with con men and charlatans”

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Quality Service Delivery the key to customer Retention-Odunze Reginald C

Image credited to gosimpletax.com

Speaking before American Bankers Association in San Francisco, Robert Schuller asked them the following questions”1) what are we in this business for anyway? 2) If we keeping going at it the way we are, will we get what we are going after? 3) If we succeed in reaching our goals, will be satisfied- and proud of how we did it? Then he ended it by saying, “Remember that at the bottom line of your business of banking, there are no numbers, only people.” Schuller 1988

Napoleon Hill devoted over twenty five years of his life to trying to discover why so few men succeed and so many fail. Le Boeuf (1987:133). He went on to say that he interviewed and studied the lives of numerous great achievers from all walks of life such as Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison and Woodrow Wilson and presented the essence of his findings in his classic bestselling “Think and grow Rich”

One of Hill’s best recommendation is to cultivate the idea and habit of rendering more and better service than that for which you are paid” and before you realized it the world is willingly paying you for more than you do” today we call that building perceived value, seventy years ago Napoleon Hill called it “the law of increasing returns” Le Boeuf (op cited)

Pension Fund Administrators are all offering the same service, a homogenous service and the service is basically the following: Retirement Savings Account, Investment of the contributor’s and retiree’s fund, Customers support services and relationship management, Retirement seminars, pension forums and enlightenment programmes.

Therefore the extra mile the PFAs goes in satisfying the customers will go a long way in enhancing customer’s loyalty. Customer loyalty is essential for the pension fund administrator because it gives the edge they need in the event of the regulatory body National Pension Commission, PenCom, lifting the transfer window

What then is the determining factor?  Quality service delivery. In a recent forum in Lagos, Pencom through its AGM public sector Abba Mamman noted that  most of the PFAs are clamoring for lifting of the transfer window. He went on to say that as they wishing and planning for all the PFAs to migrate to their PFA, so are the other also planning for the same thing. He then went on to say that the most crucial thing is to embark on aggressive customer satisfaction and quality customer delivery.