Lee Barney from PlanSponsors.com, recently reported on an article in The Cerulli Edge – U.S. Asset and Wealth Management edition that Cerulli’s expectation is that the next major development in the retirement planning industry will be plans embracing retirement income now that millions of Baby Boomers are retiring. The article cited, “The Pension Protection Act...Read More

The Executive Director of PSCA, Jack Towarnicky, addressed a workshop at the April NAPA 401(k) Summit, reporting on the findings of their 2017 survey focusing on the impacts of autoenrollment and auto-escalation features. Towarnicky reported that auto-enrollments have virtually doubled since implementation – rising to 63% in 2016, from 32% in 2007. However, participation has...Read More

A recent survey of over 4,000 American workers between the ages of 18 and 65 was recently conducted by the Empower Institute. Named “Scoring the Progress of Retirement Savers”, and reported by NAPA Net, the survey pointed out that the median projected income replacement was 64% where early Boomers were at the low end with...Read More

New results recently reported by NAPA indicate that most 401(k) consultants support additional services in DC plans. PIMCO’s 12th annual Defined Contribution Consulting Support and Trends Survey included 77 consulting firms, representing 17,000 plan sponsors with $4.4+ trillion in plan assets. 64% of those responding indicated they think plans should offer a “separate retirement income...Read More

The 28th annual Retirement Confidence Survey conducted by the Employee Benefit Research Institute reported that only 17% of surveyed employees “feel very confident in their ability to live comfortably in retirement” as recently reported in Plan Sponsor. Here are some of their findings: 3 in 10 employees with a DC plan intend to move “at...Read More

“There is a disconnect between Baby Boomers’ current financial status and where they perceive themselves in retirement,” explains Richard Burns, President and CEO of The NHP Foundation. The struggle here is the “wishful thinking” that transfers onto greater possible consequences that impacts “throughout all areas of the economy.” Discovery of this was surveyed by The...Read More

Usage of Roth options have significantly grown over the past decade. The availability of having Roth offered increased to about 63 percent of plans in 2016 in comparison to only around 30 percent in 2007. These results were obtained from a recent survey of Profit Sharing and 401(k) Plans by the Plan Sponsor Council of...Read More

The Employee Benefits Security Administration’s fiscal year coincides with that of the federal government – October 1 through September 30, and the numbers for 2017 are in, and have been reported by NAPA Net. Briefly, the agency’s total monetary recoveries for 2017 was $1.1 billion in direct payment to plans, participants and beneficiaries, vs. $777.5...Read More

Thanks to the changes resulting from the passage of the tax reform law, employee benefits programs are or will be improving. Willis Towers Watson, as reported in NAPA Net, surveyed over 300 large and mid-sized employers with 66% of those surveyed indicating they will probably be improving their benefits. Many companies have already done so....Read More

In a recent ThinkAdvisor.com report, Cerulli Associates for asset managers indicated that the “medium is just as important as the message when marketing to millennial investors. Younger investors need to be seen separately…it is crucial to identify products that are more likely to appeal to them…important differences can lie in the medium as much as...Read More