Nevin's Data "Points"

   Despite a lot of enthusiastic support for SECURE 2.0’s qualified student loan matching provision (QSLP match), employers don’t seem to be adopting that provision. Maybe there’s a reason — or two. Recently only 12% of sponsors answering  Callan ’s annual  DC survey  said they had decided to offer employer-retirement account matches on qualified student loan payments, while 49% said no and 39% said they were still deciding — and that’s a survey that skews toward larger plans, generally viewed as early adopters. Those tepid numbers have been validated in several reader polls conducted by the Plan Sponsor Council of America (PSCA). In 2023, only 2.2% of respondents said they offer or will offer the program during the year. In 2024, it was 4.7%. In the January 2025 poll covering 154 responses, the adoption rate was just 2.6%. Oh, and the “no” votes over the years were, shall we say, “emphatic”: 66.2%, 64% and 74.7% respectively, according to Pensions and Inve...

Of  all the promising provisions in the SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022, one of the most expensive (as the federal government does math, anyway) is likely to be one of the most challenging to implement. It’s not effective till 2027, so there’s still some time to figure it out—but I’m talking about the new Saver’s Match—a significantly retooled and expanded version of the Saver’s Credit (which is more properly referred to, at least by the IRS, as “ Retirement Savings Contributions Credit ”).  As with the precursor Saver’s Credit, the Saver’s Match is focused on increasing the savings of lower-income workers by—in addition to what an employer may match—making a matching contribution from the federal government. The match has a maximum value of $1,000 at a rate of $0.50 per dollar contributed by a worker, up to $2,000 annually.  The Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) has  estimated  (from tabulations of tax filers with W-2 (wage) income) that 69 million had inc...

Last week we explored the reasons why small businesses DON’T offer a retirement plan to their workers. But there are quite different—and positive—reasons for choosing to do so. The obstacles that keep most small businesses from offering a retirement plan to their workers are an assortment of factors, real and (somewhat) imagined . There ARE remedies for those concerns, [i] but mediation of those concerns doesn’t seem to be a factor in the motivations of small businesses that DO choose to offer a plan. Reasons ‘Able’ According to that recent survey by the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) and Greenwald Research, when the small business owners who offer retirement plans were asked the reasons that they do so, factors associated with attracting and retaining workers were the most prominent. Indeed, the vast majority—more than 9 in 10 of the small business owners [ii] —said that a reason they offer a plan is the positive effect on employee attitude and performanc...

There’s no one silver bullet likely to close the nation’s retirement plan coverage gap—but the target is pretty easy to spot. As it turns out, the nation’s retirement plan access coverage gap is almost exclusively found among small businesses, and it’s not hard to imagine why. The failure rate for small businesses is daunting—and those who’ve managed to avoid that fate are doubtless focused on trying to avoid becoming a statistic. Under those circumstances one can well appreciate that offering benefits, much less RETIREMENT benefits, probably seems like a luxury for another time, if not another business. A recent issue brief by Anqi Chen and Alicia Munnell of the Center for Retirement Research (CRR) at Boston College examined the issue, and drawing on previous research [i] cited the following three main barriers: uncertain revenues that make it hard for a firm to commit to a plan; employee preferences for wages and other benefits; [ii] and the cost associated with esta...