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Aug 2018Don't Believe Everything You Read!
The old adage “Don’t believe everything you read” applies to retirement-related articles as well.
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Aug 2018Why Financial Literacy Would Have Been Lost on My Younger Self
Properly executed financial literacy, financial wellness - or whatever you want to call campaigns that aim to prevent people from making poor choices with their money - are a tremendous benefit. However, traditional programs can have difficulty attracting an audience. Back when I needed it the most …
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Aug 2018Health Savings Accounts (HSAs): The Rodney Dangerfield of Retirement Savings Plans
Show of hands out there (yes, I can see you!): How many have heard of Rodney Dangerfield? Hmm….tough crowd! For the uninitiated, he was one of the greatest comedians (at least to me) when I was growing up and his entire live act centered around jokes about the fact that no one respected him. …
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Aug 2018Making Sense of Auto-Enrollment Rules
While the IRS means well, when reviewing some of the regulations, I cannot help but wonder if someone was thinking, “How can I make this as difficult to understand as possible?” Such is the case with automatic enrollment. To start, the IRS doesn’t call it auto-enrollment, they refer to it as an “au…
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Jul 2018Teach Your Children to Save
My son has $400 in his savings account. Now, that might not sound like a lot, but consider the following: My son is 12 and does not yet have a job His father, who has been working continuously since he was 11, did not have any savings until he was in his thirties; and outside of retirement, strug…
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Jul 2018Why Median > Average When it Comes to Retirement Plan Account Balances
In a recent article by Barry Ritholtz, he mentions a concept that should be drilled into every retirement plan sponsor’s head when they review their recordkeeper statistics as to the success of their retirement plan: median is more significant than average. In the retirement plan’s “dashboa…
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Jul 2018Don’t Hire an Investment Advisor!
Did the headline catch your attention? I know it sounds bizarre, given that our firm provides, well, investment advisory services - but hear me out. The majority of Requests for Proposal (RFPs) that we receive are for investment advisers or investment consultants. However, the plan spons…
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Jun 2018The Differences Between 403(b) and 401(k) Pricing
While there are some exceptions, particularly among the very largest of retirement plans, the recordkeeping fees for 401(k) plans are generally less expensive than those for 403(b) plans of the same asset size. Why is this you might ask? The answer is that 403(b) plans are fundamentally dif…
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Jun 2018Fiduciary Best Practices for Public University Retirement Plans
Last week, I had the pleasure of attending a webinar hosted by my colleagues, Joey Payne and Jeff Levy of Cammack Retirement Group, and Eric Paley of Nixon Peabody. The webinar examined best practices for public university retirement plan fiduciaries in the current litigation and regulatory environm…
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Jun 2018Retirement Jargon Confusion
As many of you are aware, there is a lot of retirement plan industry and legal jargon that is confusing not only to plan participants, but also to plan sponsors and those who work with them. In fact, one of the goals for Top of Mind and our Twitter feed is to make retirement plans mo…
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