Retirement Plan Blog

2009 was a challenging year for employers and employees. From our vintage point, we are seeing more employers than in recent years finding it necessary to return excess 401(k) contributions to Highly Compensated Employees by the March 15 deadline or...

In a recent series of three Revenue Notices and four Notices the Treasury Department issued Retirement Savings & Initiatives to help Americans save for the future. The new Initiatives: Expand automatic enrollment in 401(k) and other retirement savings plans Create...

Here is a link to my column in the May issue of Employee Benefit news about how automatic enrollment in 401(k) plans boosts 401(k) participation. (Free registration may be required). This is the first of the monthly columns I...

Suppose you’re a plan sponsor that wants to increase 401(k) participation among your low income employees, what do you do? You know, of course, that employee financial education programs by themselves are not enough to influence a change in...

That's the title of Sergio Leoni's 1966 movie considered the greatest of the Italian spaghetti westerns. We know it in this country, of course, as The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. The movie starred Clint Eastwood (the Good), Eli...

Two recent 401(k) plan terminations in our little corner of the retirement plan world does not a trend make. But it's a sign that the economic slowdown is also affecting plan sponsors. Two clients who had not made employer contributions...

It's the New Year, and it's prediction time. So what's ahead for employers in 2008? Paul Secunda in his post in The Workplace Prof Blog, 2008 Workplace Trends, points us to Diane Stafford's predictions in the on-line edition of...

Click to make bigger. Inertia, in classical physics, is defined by Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary as: “a property of matter by which it remains at rest or in uniform motion in the same straight line unless acted upon by some...

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The retirement plan tax laws have never been better, automatic enrollment makes it easy for employees to contribute to a 401(k) plan, and the new Qualified Default Investment Arrangement (QDIA) gives participants access to professional investment managers. But first, there’s...

It seems like there is always an ERISA deadline. Here's one coming up on December 1. It's the due date for a calendar year plan to distribute a safe harbor notice for 2008. If the notice is timely provided and...

Back in the day - before the Boomers were called Boomers and before choice entererd the employee benefit lexicon- the standard retirement plan was a defined benefit pension plan. The employer was responsible for the investment of plan assets, and...

If I remember my college physics course correctly, we used three space dimensions and one time dimension to describe the “real world”. Today's science uses the hypercube pictured here as the three dimensional cube extended in the direction of the...

I started to think about that question after reading Jonah Leher’s post, Don’t Read the Business Page, on The Frontal Lobe Blog. Mr. Leher tells us to ignore the mass media coverage about the stock market and the growing liquidity...

The quotation above is one of the best-known Yogiisms, and it neatly describes the battle that is shaping up before the Department of Labor (DoL) finalizes its proposed regulation on default funds. On one side are the mutual fund companies...

Choice, or rather, too many. General Motors has picked up on recent academic research that indicates that having too many investment choices in a 401(k) plan can lead some participants to pick the most conservative investment option and discourage others...

You can lose many personal items in your lifetime - your gloves, your keys, or your glasses. They're small and replaceable items. But your pension benefit is another matter. What if you lose your pension. Not because someone will take...

Automatic enrollment with a balanced default fund isn’t by itself going to solve the retirement savings issues that many employee will be facing. It will help, but the real answer is for plan sponsors is improve the communication effort....

Interesting post today in the Picking up Nickels blog about American kids lacking basic money management skills. Should we be surprised then that these same kids becoming like the college students at Wharton and Harvard about whom I recently wrote...

That's the amount of new money that Bloomberg estimates will go into 401(k) plans as a result of the Pension Protection Act of 2006 because the new law: Permits automatic enrollment of employees in 401(k) plans Allows small employers...

On Thursday, August 3, the Senate passed significant pension reform legislation by a wide margin (93 to 5). The bill enacted by the Senate is identical to the one passed by the House of Representatives last week. The President...