7/16/2015 – How a Harvard Economist Screwed Up—and Then Saved—Her Retirement (Bloomberg)

Just because you have a Ph.D. in economics doesn’t mean you know how to invest for retirement.

Alicia Munnell, the director of Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research, was a member of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers for two years before joining Boston College as a professor of management sciences in 1997. Before the council, she was assistant secretary of the Treasury for economic policy for two years. That was after working for the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston for two decades. And that was after getting her Ph.D. at Harvard.

But taking responsibility for your own investing is “too hard,” she says. Like everyone else out there, Munnell, 72, is nervous about whether she’s doing the right thing. She did make a couple of smart financial decisions in her early 50s that firmed up her financial footing. They had nothing to do with stocks or bonds.

Read the full article in Bloomberg.