Showing entries from 2019.
28
Feb 2019Why Borrowing from a Retirement Plan to Pay off Debt is a Bad Idea
It sounds like a no brainer: you’ve racked up high-interest credit card debt, so to pay it off, you plan to borrow from your 401(k)/403(b) plan at a low interest rate that you (in most cases) pay back to yourself. Thus replacing high-interest debt with loan interest debt - and saving tons of money i…
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Feb 2019Beware of these Heavily-Marketed Recordkeeper Products
I often have retirement plan sponsors ask me, “What is your opinion of Product X?” More often than not, it is a product that has been aggressively promoted by their retirement plan recordkeeper. Now, to be fair to retirement plan recordkeepers, with lower fees and declining margins, they are in an i…
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Feb 2019Simplifying Retirement Plans
According to the latest data, participants are utterly and hopelessly confused about their retirement plans. From lifecycle funds, to the different types of withdrawals/rollovers (a recent white paper cited that participants are more likely to interpret a rollover as a “trick one teaches a dog”), to…
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Feb 2019Why Debt is the Biggest Barrier to Retirement Savings: An Insider’s Perspective
One of the most important communication engagement campaigns that a retirement plan sponsor can conduct is working to create a culture in which savings is cool and debt is not – and helping employees to reduce their debt as much as possible. Debt can destroy the capacity for retirement and other sav…
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Jan 2019Decumulation Confusion
Just as the accumulation of sufficient assets is vital to retirement, proper decumulation - or the spending of those assets during retirement - is equally critical. We talk a lot about the former, but not so much about the latter; however as more Baby Boomers age into retirement, this will likely be…
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Jan 2019You Have a Retirement Plan Committee - But Do You Have a Committee Charter?
Retirement plan committees (which are sometimes broken down into separate committees such as an investment committee and/or an administrative committee) serve an important function to ensure that the plan fiduciaries fulfill their responsibilities. While most plan sponsors utilize these committees,…
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Jan 2019Revisiting My 2018 Retirement Plan Trends
A little over one year ago, I made some predictions as to what the hot trends would for retirement plans in 2018. Let’s take a look to see how accurate I was: Next generation auto-enrollment techniques will gain in popularity - Verdict: Unknown. I have not yet seen any studies of 2018 data for tren…
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Jan 2019The Stock Market Soap Opera and Some Basic Math
The volatility of the stock market has become a major news story lately. But, as we well know, there is a tendency for the media to exaggerate. So, is the current stock market “crisis” real - or just a soap opera? And, if the “crisis” has substance, should it cause concern for retirement plan invest…
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Jan 2019Why I No Longer Make New Year’s Resolutions
In a sea of retirement and other savings-related articles about 2019 New Year’s resolutions, you won’t find one from me. Why? Because I hardly ever keep my resolutions, due to the fact that most require concrete actions, and inertia tends to take hold when I get busy. So what did I do instead? When…
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