Sun, Jun 29, 2025, 7:30 AM6 min read

Every week or so, I bank some personal finance nuggets that don't make it into my Yahoo Finance columns. So now — and in weeks to come — I'll be clearing out my notebook. Here we go:

Private equity comes to your 401(k)? BlackRock (BLK) announced this week that it’s launching a target-date fund that will consist of private credit, private equity, and other investments, aiming to increase the annual return an extra 0.5% — and roughly 15% more money in your 401(k) over a 40-year lifecycle of a target date solution.

The fund will be offered by Great Gray Trust, which offers retirement investment options and manages over $210 billion in assets. Empower, the second-largest retirement services provider in the US, has aligned with top-tier private investment fund managers and custodians, including Apollo Global Management (APO), Yahoo Finance’s owner, and Goldman Sachs (GS).

BlackRock Chief Executive Officer Larry Fink proposed this idea a few months ago. Instead of a traditional 60/40 split between stocks and bonds, he wants everyday investors to branch out and diversify into private market assets. “The future standard portfolio may look more like 50/30/20 — stocks, bonds, and private assets like real estate, infrastructure, and private credit,” Fink wrote in his annual letter to clients in April.

Sounds good on the surface, but there's a big red flag in all this: more risk. That’s a big concern for me and many experts I spoke with this week. There are trade-offs. These investments are riskier than the run-of-the-mill index funds most target-date retirement funds hold, have higher fees, and are less liquid. That makes it a scramble to pull funds out if the markets drop, so a long investment horizon is critical.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission’s Office of the Investor Advocate announced this week that it will look into the use of private equity and other alternative investments in retirement accounts.

Shuttering the blinds. Social Security has gone dark on reporting its processing times for benefits and help on its website. The SSA took down six webpages that contained a collection of performance statistics about live phone and claims data around June 6, according to a memo written by researchers with the Strategic Organizing Center, a nonprofit labor alliance, provided to Yahoo Finance.

For 10 days, the page was offline. If you went to the site, it read: “Under Maintenance. This section is currently being improved. Sorry for the inconvenience.” The page remained offline until the SSA put up an altered page on June 16th. Most previous statistics and charts were deleted, and all data was consolidated into a single page with three sections.