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Oct 2020Retirement/Financial Wellness Adages That May Not Be Helpful
A recent Forbes article indicated that the new retirement income annuity projections mandated by the SECURE Act, which are intended to encourage retirement savings, might have the opposite effect. For example, if a participant realizes that their $125,000 retirement account balance can only purchase…
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Oct 2020Why Grandfathering Can Backfire
On paper, grandfathering often sounds like a good idea when a retirement plan change might be perceived by existing employees as being a negative. Implementing auto-enrollment? Let’s not disrupt existing employees and only auto-enroll new ones. Cutting back on employer contributions due to COVID-19?…
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Sep 2020Helping Those Who Can’t Afford to Save for Retirement (or Anything Else)
The number one reason given by people who don’t save for retirement is that they cannot afford it. And, for some people, this is truly the case; their income is so low, relative to necessary expenses, that they are unable to save at all. For these individuals, Social Security provides a decent safet…
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Sep 2020Why "Six is the New Three" When It Comes to Automatic Enrollment
At last month’s Retirement Advisor Council annual meeting, I had the pleasure of sitting in on a session about participant retirement readiness, where Joe Smith made the statement: “six is the new three” when it comes to automatic enrollment. While I tend to be a sucker for snappy catch phrases, her…
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Sep 2020Young People, Financial Wellness, and Some Interesting Survey Data
Many retirement plan sponsors are aware that financial wellness/independence is a powerful benefit that should be strongly considered or enhanced. Generally, employees who are more financially healthy are able to save more for retirement (and other purposes). And, thanks to the magic of compounding,…
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Aug 2020How Successful is Your Retirement Plan? Ask This Simple Question
There are many ways to measure the success of a retirement plan - from simple methods such as assessing plan asset growth, average account balance, and voluntary participation percentage metrics, to more complicated approaches like monitoring the percentage of participants on track to accumulate eno…
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Aug 2020Participant Engagement: Determining Your Audience’s Preferences
One of the challenges associated with successfully engaging retirement plan participants is figuring out your audience’s preferences. Let’s take myself as an example, ignoring the fact that I work in the retirement plan industry for a moment. As a 50-something Gen Xer, my plan’s recordkeeper/TPA mi…
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Aug 2020More Questionable Retirement Plan Features
In a recent Top of Mind, and in our latest webinar, we shared some questionable plan features that came back to haunt retirement plan sponsors during the COVID-19 pandemic. But there are plenty of other questionable plan features that all too many plan sponsors adopt that can greatly increase plan a…
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Jul 2020What’s on the Agenda for Your Next Retirement Plan Due Diligence Meeting?
Another quarter has closed - and, for many plan sponsors, that means another quarterly due diligence meeting is just around the corner. Let’s say you are the committee chair in charge of putting together the agenda for the meeting. What will it consist of? Chances are that it will include a thoroug…
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Jul 2020Getting to the Bottom of Financial Wellness
Recently, I had the opportunity to collaborate with a wonderful group of people at the Retirement Advisor Council to produce a comprehensive position paper, “What do You Mean When You Say Financial Wellness?” While a hot button term, if ten different people were asked to define financial wellness/in…
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