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Economix Blog: Jaydens and Aidens Are Taking Over

May 10, 2013 by Leave a Comment

CATHERINE RAMPELL

CATHERINE RAMPELL

Dollars to doughnuts.

It’s not your imagination: Jaydens, Aidens, Ethans and Masons really are taking over, at least among baby boys.

On Thursday, the Social Security Administration released its annual list of most popular baby names from the last year. Within the top 10 names for boys were the names above, which, as you may note, all end in the letter N. Names ending in the letter N have become phenomenally popular in recent years — so much so, in fact, that they have dominated the list of the top 1,000 boys’ names.

Source: Social Security Administration

The chart above plots the total number of babies born who have a name in the top 1,000 list in 2012, sorted by the last letter of their name. Laura Wattenberg, creator of babynamewizard.com, first conducted this last-letter name analysis a few years ago. Using a longer-tail list of boys’ names — all names given five or more times in 2012, which totals the top 14,162 names for boys — she estimates that more than a third of all baby boys born in 2012 had a name that ended in N.

Some of these N-names are falling in popularity. “Braeden,” for example, fell over 100 spots last year to No. 581 in 2012 from No. 476 in 2011. But these N-names are still hugely more popular than they were decades ago. Here is Ms. Wattenberg’s chart for the distributions of names for boys born in 1950, sorted by the last letter of their given name:

Courtesy of Laura Wattenberg, babynamewizard.com.

As you can see, there was a large cluster of N-names, but still more equitable distribution among a few other letters, particularly D’s, S’s and Y’s.

For more data analysis on baby names, I suggest Ms. Wattenberg’s blog and a “Freakonomics” excerpt on the trickling-down of baby names from higher-income families to lower-income ones. The Social Security Web site also lets you track a name’s popularity over time.

The Social Security site also lists the top five names each year over the last century. Jacob has been No. 1 for 14 years  now for boys. Sophia has been the top girls’ name for the last two years.

Article source: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/10/jaydens-and-aidens-are-taking-over/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Economy News Tagged With: , ,

Bucks Blog: More Flexibility Added for Roth 401(k) Conversions

January 3, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The new fiscal bill, the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012, includes a provision that adds more flexibility to Roth retirement accounts.

Now, individuals can convert their existing 401(k) retirement plan to a Roth 401(k)– assuming their employer offers the Roth version, and allows conversions — regardless of whether they are eligible to take distributions out of the plan.

Previous rules allowed conversion from a 401(k) plan to a Roth version only if you were eligible to take funds out of the account. That meant, in general, that you had to be 59 and a half, dead, disabled or had left the employer (unless the plan allowed “in service” withdrawals), said Michael Kitces, a financial planner who summarized the change in his blog.

“It wasn’t very useful for most people,” he said. But now, he added, “Even if you still work there, and are younger than 59 and a half, you can do conversions.”

Investors who convert from a traditional, tax-deferred account to a Roth account do so because they have decided it’s preferable to pay taxes on their contributions now and avoid paying them later, when tax rates are likely to be higher. (Employee contributions to Roth 401(k)’s are taxable, but withdrawals are tax free.)

Essentially, Mr. Kitces said in his blog, the new rule means you can now do “intra-plan” 401(k) conversions “from traditional to Roth in the same manner you can do so for I.R.A.’s.”

The change doesn’t necessarily mean there will be a rush of people converting their 401(k)’s, he said. For one thing, your employer has to offer Roth 401(k)’s. (About 40 percent of employers do, according to the benefits consultants Aon Hewitt.) And as with I.R.A. conversions, you have to have the money to pay the taxes on the conversion. “We certainly expect to see some people take advantage,” he said, “but don’t expect an onslaught of conversions due to this provision.”

Alison Borland, vice president for retirement solutions and strategies at Aon Hewitt, noted that it’s optional for companies to offer Roth 401(k) plans, and it’s also optional for them to offer conversions. But the new rules may make conversions more compelling to employees, she said, so there may be more incentive for companies to allow them.

Previously, she said, the amount to be converted was subject to annual limitations on retirement plan withdrawals, which can vary by employer. But under the new provision, she said, employees can convert the entire balance in their plan to the Roth version.

“I do think this will give more plan sponsors a reason to add it,” she said. She also noted that companies will probably need additional guidance from the I.R.S. before they actually begin to allow conversions.

Would you consider converting your 401(k) to a Roth version, if you’re given the opportunity?

Article source: http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/03/more-flexibility-added-for-roth-401k-conversions/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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DealBook: Madoff Victims Set to Get First Payments

October 5, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Jin Lee/Bloomberg NewsBernard L. Madoff leaving court in 2009.

8:23 p.m. | Updated

The first batch of checks for eligible victims of Bernard L. Madoff’s epic Ponzi scheme will go into the mail starting Wednesday, according to the trustee liquidating the Madoff estate in federal bankruptcy court.

The payment — totaling $312 million — “is the first return of stolen funds to Madoff’s defrauded customers,” the trustee, Irving H. Picard, said on Tuesday. “The need among many Madoff customers is urgent, and we are working to expedite these distributions.”

The payments would have been made last week, but were delayed for a few days to allow Mr. Picard’s lawyers to analyze the effects of a significant ruling on Sept. 27 by Judge Jed S. Rakoff of United States District Court in Manhattan in a case involving the owners of the New York Mets. In that ruling, Judge Rakoff allowed the trustee to seek only the return of fictional profits the Mets owners withdrew in the last two years of the fraud, which lasted more than a decade.

The trustee, citing New York State law, had sought to recover fictional profits paid in the six years before the scheme collapsed in December 2008. The judge also rejected the trustee’s bid to recover preference claims, the cash paid to team owners in the last 90 days of the fraud.

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If applied to the hundreds of lawsuits Mr. Picard is pursuing against other Madoff investors who withdrew more than their original cash principal, the ruling would reduce Mr. Picard’s potential recoveries by $6.2 billion.

The trustee delayed the payments last week until he could determine if the ruling would affect the proposed distribution. Those potential issues “have since been resolved,” Mr. Picard said Tuesday in a statement.

The $312 million is being distributed to the holders of 1,230 Madoff accounts and represents a recovery of roughly 4.6 cents on the dollar. The customers eligible for payouts are those who had not withdrawn all the cash they had invested. Some may have already received cash advances of as much as $500,000 from the Securities Investors Protection Corporation, an industry-financed fund that handles brokerage firm liquidations. Under a federal appeals court ruling in August, investors who recovered all their initial cash outlay before the fraud collapsed are not eligible for the current distribution.

Through out-of-court settlements by the trustee and civil forfeiture agreements with the Justice Department, $10.7 billion has been collected to cover what the trustee estimates to be about $18 billion in out-of-pocket cash losses by eligible victims — a sum that ultimately could allow those victims to recover more than half the cash they lost in the Madoff fraud, far more than is typical in Ponzi schemes.

According to the trustee, that cash — including $7.2 billion from the estate of Jeffry Picower, a longtime Madoff investor who died in 2009 — cannot be distributed until the resolution of appeals challenging the terms of those settlements and the formula Mr. Picard used to calculate eligible claims in the complex and controversial liquidation.

“While we cannot predict the timing of rulings on these appeals, we maintain that the appeals of the Picower and other settlements are frivolous and will be dismissed,” said David J. Sheehan, a lawyer for the trustee and a partner at Baker Hostetler. If the trustee prevails in those court battles, he would “distribute those funds as quickly as possible,” Mr. Sheehan said.

Mr. Picard has sued for nearly $100 billion in fictional profits and damages from giant global banks, hedge funds and investment managers who dealt with Mr. Madoff during his scheme. If the trustee recovers more than the $18 billion, the money could be used to cover general fraud claims by all Madoff investors.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=03fa6a39419a4ad46f2682769003d000

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,