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Nov 2019Top of Mind Mailbag: Emergency Savings Accounts
In response to last week’s Top of Mind post on the merits of Automated Emergency Savings Funds, a reader shared a decidedly different viewpoint, which is worth sharing with our readers. He noted that, in general, those who are unprepared for an emergency are also less likely to be saving enough for …
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Oct 2019The New DOL e-Disclosure Regs
On October 22, 2019, the Department of Labor (DOL) issued the long-anticipated proposed regulations addressing electronic disclosure of ERISA-required documents such as Summary Plan Descriptions, benefit statements, fee disclosures and blackout notices. For retirement plan sponsors, the paperwork bu…
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Oct 2019Automated Emergency Savings Funds: Why Retirement Plan Sponsors Should Consider Offering Them
Technology that automates after-tax savings has come a long way. From rounding up all purchases and saving the difference, saving when a raise is received, to monitoring spending patterns and automatically saving more when there is more money in an individual’s checking account(s), there are far mor…
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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…
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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 …
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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