Kathleen Kennedy Townsend to Host Second Retirement Program on FCTV

Falmouth - Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the Secretary’s Representative for Pensions and Retirement at the U.S. Department of Labor, will host the second of a series of live programs at Falmouth Community Television (FCTV) at 5:00 PM on Wednesday, December 14, entitled Making Good Financial Decisions at Every Age = Security in Retirement. The topic of this episode is “Smart Strategies for Savers, Retirees, and Job Switchers.” A distinguished panel of retirement experts will join Ms. Townsend, including Joshua Dietch, Consultant, DCIIA’s Retirement Research Center; Tim Rouse, Executive Director of the SPARK Institute; Geoffrey Sanzenbacher, Associate Professor of the Practice at Boston College; and Anna-Marie Tabor, Director of the Pension Action Center at UMass Boston.

In this episode, Ms. Townsend and the panel will discuss a range of topics, including the best times to apply for Social Security benefits, tax advantages and tax issues for retirees, and easily moving your retirement plan from one job to another.

$92 billion dollars are lost each year from employees not taking their retirement savings from one employer to another. The panel will discuss strategies an individual can take in making successful decisions and provide valuable insights on how to protect yourself from scams.

The program can be viewed on FCTV - Public Channel 13 or via YouTube, Roku, Apple TV, or www.fctv.org.

As the State of Maryland’s first woman lieutenant governor from 1995 to 2003, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend was in charge of a multimillion-dollar budget and oversaw several major cabinet departments. Before being elected lieutenant governor, Townsend served as deputy assistant attorney general of the United States. She also led the Governor’s Retirement Security Task Force for the State of Maryland in 2014 and 2015, which helped spearhead efforts to enact a state-run retirement plan for workers not covered by a retirement plan at work. Ms. Townsend was the Director of Retirement Security at the Economic Policy Institute from 2018 to 2019. Also, she served as a research professor at Georgetown University, where she founded the Center for Retirement Initiatives.

Joshua Dietch is a senior retirement and financial services executive and is a consultant with DCIIA’s Retirement Research Center. Most recently, he was head of Retirement Thought Leadership at T. Rowe Price. Past roles include head of Retirement and Institutional at Strategic Insight, managing director with Chatham Partners, director of Product Marketing and Management with ADP Retirement Services, and associate director of Institutional Markets with Cerulli Associates. Joshua is a member of the Defined Contribution Institutional Investment Association and has served on its Executive Committee and chaired the Executive Committee of its Retirement Research Center. Joshua also serves on the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Retirement. Joshua holds FINRA Series 7 and 66 licenses and earned his B.A. in history from Bates College.

Tim Rouse is the Executive Director of the SPARK Institute, the association for the retirement industry. SPARK represents the interests of a broad-based cross-section of retirement plan service providers and investment managers, including banks, mutual fund companies, insurance companies, third-party administrators, trade clearing firms, and benefits consultants. Tim took over as the Executive Director of the SPARK Institute after spending over thirty-five years in the financial services industry, mainly within the retirement services of large mutual fund companies. Tim has worked with significant plan sponsors in state and local governments, corporations, Taft-Hartley plans, nonprofit hospitals, colleges, and universities for the past thirty years. Over his career, Tim has worked with Voya Financial, Fidelity Investments, ICMA Retirement Corporation, and The Vanguard Group. Tim is a former President of the National Association of Government Defined Contribution Administrators’ Industry Board and a graduate of Villanova University.

Geoffrey Sanzenbacher, Ph.D., received his Ph.D. from Boston College in Economics in 2010 and is currently an Associate Professor of the Practice at the Boston College Department of Economics. Since 2014, he has taught a course on the Economics of Inequality at BC, as well as Principles of Microeconomics, Microeconomic Theory, and Econometrics. Dr. Sanzenbacher is the author of over twenty peer-reviewed academic articles in the fields of Economics and Policy, including in The Journal of Health Economics, The International Economic Review, Demography, The Monthly Labor Review, and The Journal of Pension Economics and Finance. He has also been cited in newspapers, including the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, financial magazines such as Kiplinger’s, and has been interviewed on National Public Radio and appeared live on the New England Cable News network. Prior to joining the BC Economics Department, Dr. Sanzenbacher worked at the Analysis Group in Boston and at The Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

Anna-Marie Tabor is the Director of the Pension Action Center, a free legal services program at the University of Massachusetts Boston that helps retirees secure their pension benefits. Before joining PAC, Anna served as a Deputy Fair Lending Director at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where she worked to prevent illegal discrimination in lending. She also previously served as an attorney at the Federal Reserve Board, Assistant Attorney General at the Office of the Massachusetts Attorney General, and Special Assistant at the U.S. Department of Treasury. Anna earned her J.D. at Harvard Law School and an M.Sc. in Economics from the London School of Economics. In addition to her role at PAC, she is an Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Massachusetts School of Law.