Retirement

Call it the holy grail, silver bullet or magic pill, but the universal goal of benefits professionals is finding a way to lower costs while maintaining employee engagement. Ron Leopold, vice president medical director for MetLife, says the magic ingredients in the “money pill” may be investments in helping employees find physical and fiscal success.

Employers may find new success in influencing employees to make smarter financial decisions. Last week, a program that reaches employees through an employer-based education program announced the results of Investor Education in Your Workplace, and they were hopeful.

Around the time they turn 50, many people unconsciously begin to ratchet up their spending. Instead, prominent retirement planning scholar Alice P. Munnell thinks financial planners and employers need to wage a campaign to get their clients and employees to hit the pause button at this crucial midpoint in their lives. …

A flood of U.S. retirements is threatening to burst its dam and drown aging Americans with rising living costs, but one group is proposing a novel way to protect private-sector workers: Invest in public pension plans.

A recent survey of 3,300 working Americans conducted by Putnam Investments reveals that American households are on track to replace only about 64% of their current income in retirement — significantly less than the 75% of income that most financial professionals recommend.

Whaddaya know? All this time, I thought it was just retirement plan participants who didn’t understand the fees they were paying. Turns out, according to a recent Spectrem Group study, plan sponsors don’t understand plan fees all that well either — only 45% of plan sponsors fully understand their retirement plan fees, according to the report that evaluated some 600 plan sponsors with assets under management of $10 million to $200 million. …

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has issued additional guidance on how a plan sponsor can demonstrate that it is not using reimbursements received under the Early Retiree Reinsurance Program as general revenue by maintaining the level of its contributions to the plan.

At Draper Laboratory, Allen Hymovitz, the senior manager of benefits and quality of life, takes both facets of his title seriously. Retirement is not just about financial planning, he says. It's about planning for an extended vacation.

The majority of Americans think that planning for retirement is easier for those who are not married, according to Charles Schwab's latest quarterly retirement pulse survey findings released yesterday. More than half (53%) of married Americans and more than two-thirds (69%) of singles say they believe it is easier to make major financial decisions for retirement when there is no spouse in the picture.

According to new survey results from Charles Schwab, 401(k) plan sponsors are offering participants more counseling but less cash to help them prepare for retirement.