Showing entries with the topic “Retirement Readiness”.
09
Jan 2020The Retirement Plan Terms to Avoid
At a recent That 401(k) Conference, I had pleasure of viewing a presentation on a defined contribution plan language study from Invesco that, to be frank, floored me. Common retirement plan terms, used by me and many others, scored terribly when deployed in participant communications – with some eve…
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Nov 2019How Much Does My Retirement Plan Cost?
Here’s an exercise for you: navigate to your recordkeeper’s website and see if you can determine the exact amount you are paying for your retirement plan. If you’re a plan fiduciary or someone who works with retirement plan benefits, you already know this cost, but play along anyway - you may be sur…
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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 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 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 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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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…
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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…
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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…
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