Showing entries with the topic “Retirement Readiness”.
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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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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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Jul 2020Approaching Retirement? Be Careful with Equities (and this has little to do with COVID-19!)
A recent PLANSPONSOR article cited a February study which indicated that the average individual nearing retirement held 78% of his/her portfolios in stocks. While that percentage may have declined, given what has happened since February, COVID-19 should be irrelevant to the argument as to why those …
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Jun 2020The Retirement Problems — and Solutions — for Younger Boomers
The latest State of the Participant 2020 report from John Hancock brought some unwelcome news, echoed in other recordkeeper reports: the younger half of the Baby Boomer generation — those aged 56 to 65 — are generally unprepared for retirement. In the report, the two age cohorts spanned …
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Jun 2020Replacing Mandatory Employee Contributions with Automatic Enrollment
While mandatory contributions are a necessity in defined benefit plans to ensure proper funding, I have never been a proponent of them in defined contribution plans, except when they serve as the only way to make pre-tax contributions to a qualified retirement plan (such as 414(h) pickup contributio…
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May 2020The COVID-19 Pandemic Sheds Light on Questionable Retirement Plan Features
With many optional plan features, plan sponsors have a great deal of choice when it comes to designing their retirement plan: make the right choice and the plan is attractive to participants without being too difficult to administer; make the wrong choice and it may lead to the opposite situation. …
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May 2020Is Now the Time for a Roth Conversion?
Allowed by some retirement plans, a Roth conversion permits the transfer of pre-tax dollars to Roth, with income taxes paid on the transferred amount, instead of upon the distribution of the pre-tax funds. (once certain qualifications are met, Roth balances are not taxed at all upon distribution). …
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