Benefits Think

If you are a small business owner and the reason you are giving your customers to buy from you is price, EBA Contributor Kevin Trokey strongly encourages you to start looking for another reason. In this world of big box stores and Internet shopping, small businesses just can’t compete on price.

Become a fan of EBN on Facebook to post your guesses for an exclusive snippet of our December cover story!

When was the last time you took a good, introspective look at your client base and thought about saying goodbye to a client? For EBA Blogger Beverly Beattie, it’s important to give clients tremendous value and for my clients to know they are fully receiving it.

Results from Towers Watson’s recent Global Workforce Study that shows almost half of U.S. workers (49%) are willing to trade paid time off and future career advancement opportunities for guaranteed retirement benefits. Why? Do employees think a secure retirement largely is out of their control?

Access to quality life insurance for middle and lower income families has disappeared over the past 10 to 20 years. A life insurance agent simply cannot make lower income American’s a primary market and be financially successful, says blogger Tinker Kelly. But how can you overcome that?

Is it worth it to cut employee hours and/or hire more part-time workers to avoid higher health plan costs under health care reform? Guest blogger Linda K. Riddell looks at both sides.

Rumor has it that the Department of Labor recently hired a lot of new field auditors, which could only mean one thing — more audits. Which Principal Financial's Aaron Friedman says means it is safe to say that more 403(b) plans will be put on the firing line as well. Just what we need, right? Well, a little work now and some knowledge may help, so keep reading.

Now that health reform is here to stay, blogger Dave Petno says he is ready for the challenge to understand what he calls the “entire 2,700 page monstrosity.” Here’s how you can be prepared too for your client’s questions.

As EBN legal contributor Frank Palmieri noted just before election day, an Obama re-election would have employers “doing the numbers” to see how PPACA’s various mandates would stack up against the ability to maintain profits. So far, a number of leaders at large employers don't like what they see.

'Obamacare,' Exchanges, Medicare Surtax, MLR’s etc … it goes on and on, the litany of challenges, concerns and issues that may call into question our very survival. Perhaps this is really all about perspective. Sometimes we are so close to a situation that we lose sight of the big picture issues.