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Mar 2019Recordkeeper Financial Wellness Portals: My Personal Experience
As you might imagine, I access the website of my own retirement plan from time-to-time - not so much to check on my personal account, but to see the latest and greatest participant offerings from the recordkeeper. Upon my latest visit, I noticed that there was a “financial wellness” tab. As Top of M…
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Mar 2019The Best Reason to Save for Retirement
One of the most popular excuses as to why someone can’t save for retirement (right behind, “I can’t afford it”) is: “Retirement is so far off in the future; I could be dead by then.” This “living for today” mentality generally entails the premise of enjoying life to the fullest - which, apparently m…
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Mar 2019The Retirement Plan Raiders are Back!
The anecdotal signs were there: increasing calls from “advisors” requesting instructions on how to roll over plan assets from a qualified retirement plan to an IRA (generally with the participant to whom the IRA was just sold in the room). Often, the participant to whom the advisor is providing “gui…
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Mar 2019Social Media Update
You may have noticed that we have made some exciting changes to our Cammack Retirement Group reader experience! In our constant effort to improve, I am excited to announce the following social media enhancements: We launched a new podcast called Revamping Retirement! Hosted by yours truly, Revampin…
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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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