17
Oct 2019Small Balance Cash-Outs: The One Provision that Doesn’t Make Sense
Does your retirement plan have a mandatory cash-out provision for account balances of $5,000 or less, where terminated employees automatically receive a distribution unless they elect otherwise? This provision, when properly administered, greatly minimizes the number of missing participants in a pla…
Read more10
Oct 2019The Competition for Retirement Savings Dollars
In order to increase participation and savings rates in their retirement plans, plan sponsors need to figure out why people don’t save - and then provide solutions to address that problem. Identifying the problem is easy; just about every survey I’ve seen has stated that the number one participant …
Read more03
Oct 2019How a Financial Wellness Expo Became the Hottest Ticket in Town
One of the biggest challenges for financial wellness programs is engaging employees. But what if I told you that one plan sponsor figured out how to pack a convention center with 3,000 people for a financial wellness expo? Yes, that is not a typo: three thousand people! This is not some retirement p…
Read more26
Sep 2019What I Learned from Reading My Retirement Plan Fee Disclosure
I have a confession to make: While I have written extensively on annual participant fee disclosures for retirement plans, I have never read the participant fee disclosure for my own plan! It’s a little embarrassing, given that I work in the retirement plan industry, but to me, the idea of reading a…
Read more19
Sep 2019Retirement Savings Clichés
Having been in this business nearly 28 years, I have heard almost every retirement savings cliché that there is. While some have validity, others do not. Let’s take a look at the more popular retirement savings clichés and see if they should hang around or be “retired,” themselves: “Pay yourself fi…
Read more12
Sep 2019Retirement, Financial Wellness, and the Power of Simplicity
One of my favorite personal finance bloggers, J. Money, recently wrote a piece on the Beauty of Simplicity, that, in my opinion, should be required reading for pretty much everyone - and particularly for retirement plan sponsors. Why? Because we often make the participant experience far too complica…
Read more05
Sep 2019Top of Mind Mailbag: The Roth Conundrum
On occasion, a Top of Mind blog post generates so many reader comments that it is worth sharing. This was the case with our recent piece on the Roth Conundrum. Below are some of the comments we received in our “mailbag”: One email addressed the potential future changes in tax law:“Great read on Rot…
Read more29
Aug 2019Vacation and Retirement
As I was enjoying my recent vacation, I thought about some of the articles I have seen indicating that retirement is very different than vacation. However, if retirement is not like vacation (in the sense that vacation is far more favorable to working), then why retire? Don’t get me wrong, I thorou…
Read more22
Aug 2019The Roth Conundrum
With Roth utilization at next-to-nil levels in many retirement plans, the Roth marketing machine appears to have hit overdrive, as hardly a day goes by without an article touting the fantastic benefits of Roth contributions, as opposed to traditional 403(b)/401(k)/457(b) pre-tax deferrals. But is R…
Read more15
Aug 2019Random Nuggets I’ve Learned From the Internet
One of the benefits of scanning the internet for content is that, even after nearly 28 years in the business, I still learn an amazing amount of new things about retirement. So, I thought it might be prudent to start a new feature in Top of Mind to share this wisdom with you - we’ll call it “Random …
Read more