Showing entries with the topic “Retirement Readiness”.
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Feb 2021The “Best” Annuity Out There: The One Participants Already Have
A frequent question from participants transitioning from the accumulation phase to the decumulation phase of their retirement plan lifecycle is whether they should consider using some or all of their assets to purchase an annuity to lock in an income stream in retirement. Often, what these participa…
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Feb 2021There’s Always Money in the Retirement Plan
In the cult classic TV sitcom, Arrested Development, one of the funniest scenes involved former CEO-turned-prisoner, George Bluth (played by Jeffrey Tambor), and his son, Michael Bluth (played by Jason Bateman). During a jailhouse visit to George, Michael indicated that there was money trouble, to w…
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Jan 2021Measuring ROI on Financial Wellness Programs
Considering the woeful state of employee financial wellness statistics and the number of individuals living paycheck-to-paycheck, employer-sponsored financial wellness program should be relatively effective. But how can we determine whether the programs are working as intended? There has not been a…
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Dec 2020Getting to the Bottom of Financial Wellness for Women
The challenges facing women as they strive to achieve financial wellness are unique - and this year’s pandemic has shed even more light on just how important the topic is. In collaboration with my peers at the Retirement Advisor Council, we look to highlight some of the key elements of this importan…
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Oct 2020SECURE Act Refresher
Although it was signed into law on December 20, 2019, it seems like a decade ago that the SECURE Act was headline news. Between the COVID-19 pandemic and the flurry of legislative and regulatory activity in 2020, some plan sponsors have likely forgotten what was, at the time, the first piece of reti…
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Oct 2020Should Retirement Plan Sponsors Be Limiting Plan Loans?
As I have written in the past, I am not a fan of retirement plan loan overutilization, for a variety of reasons. However, loan regulations clearly provide plan sponsors with a great deal of flexibility in this area, including the ability to be overly permissive, quite restrictive, or somewhere in be…
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Sep 2020Helping Those Who Can’t Afford to Save for Retirement (or Anything Else)
The number one reason given by people who don’t save for retirement is that they cannot afford it. And, for some people, this is truly the case; their income is so low, relative to necessary expenses, that they are unable to save at all. For these individuals, Social Security provides a decent safet…
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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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