Nevin's Data "Points"

There’s nothing like the NAPA 401(k) Summit—particularly being  at  the NAPA 401(k) Summit after the many months and a worldwide pandemic that kept us all apart.  Each year for the past four years we’ve taken advantage of that gathering (including in 2020 when we gathered “virtually”) to reach out [i]  to the nation’s top retirement plan advisors to glean their perspective on a wide range of issues relating to their practice—and practices.  This year’s  Summit Insider  was no exception—as we “consulted” with more than 500 retirement plan advisors and home office staff on a range of issues—the criteria in selecting—and rejecting—key business relationships, the things that are over-hyped—and the things that no one is talking about—but that everyone, at least in the eyes of these “Insiders,” should be. We also got some insights on retirement income, important features in choosing target-date funds, rollovers and outcomes.  We’ve included a...

The Plan Sponsor Council of America recently released its 60th Annual Survey of Profit-Sharing and 401(k) Plans , documenting increases in participation, deferral rates, target-date funds, automatic enrollment and advisor hiring, among other key trends. Here are five key trends highlighted in the survey that you may have missed. Automatic enrollment is still (mostly) a large plan thing. One of the most celebrated plan design features of the 401(k) era is automatic enrollment. Nearly as old as the 401(k) itself, once upon a time (when it wasn’t as popular) it was called a “negative election.” Regardless of the name, the concept has been extraordinarily effective at not only getting, but keeping, workers saving via their workplace retirement plans. However, adoption of the design, after a surge in the wake of the passage of the Pension Protection Act of 2006, now seems to have plateaued. A decade ago, only about a third (35.6%) of respondents to the PSCA su...

It’s obvious why participants have a vested interest (literally) in the retirement income — the outcome, really — of their retirement savings plans. Here are four reasons why plan sponsors should care about outcomes. You want your employees to appreciate your benefit plan(s). If you’re responsible for benefit plans in your organization, you have a very real interest in how your workforce (and management team) view those benefits. Plan sponsors have long used participation rate as the plan success metric — after all, what better measure of success in plan design, education and communication than the objective data as to how many employees have chosen to participate. But in a time when a growing number of plans have adopted automatic enrollment — well, while credit is certainly due plan sponsors who have taken that step, the resulting bump in participation rates owe more to the inertia of human behavior than innovative plan design. There is, however, little question that the bet...