Wealth management

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.

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.

Although most retirement plan sponsors train their laser focus on helping participants save adequately for retirement — and rightly so — one nonprofit group is encouraging sponsors also to pay attention to assisting pre-retirees in preparing for the income distribution phase.

In case you missed it, the East Coast has had an odd month or so with an earthquake, hurricane and flooding. In trying to find money to pay for repairs and clean up, some folks might look to their retirement plan savings as a resource. Here are the nuts and bolts of "hardship distributions."

The dot-com crash and the Great Recession have taken a serious and lasting toll on the risk appetites of Generation Y, according to the latest MFS Investing Sentiment Survey. This generation, between the ages of 18 and 30, are “investing more like their parents and grandparents, many of whom grew up in the shadows of the Great Depression,” says William Finnegan, senior managing director of U.S. retail marketing for MFS.

A new study from Fidelity Investments found that 401(k) investors who pulled out of the equities market during the 2008-2009 economic downturn experienced only 2% growth, while those who maintained their investment strategy eventually saw growth of 50% by the second quarter of this year.

With more older Americans delaying retirement to work longer and cutbacks looming in federal social insurance programs, many wonder what retirement will hold.

While there is projected to be a slight uptick in salary increases in 2012 compared to 2011, companies are continuing to place the greatest focus on variable pay, according to the U.S. Salary Increase Survey released by Aon Corporation. Aon Hewitt surveyed 1,494 large U.S. companies in June and July, which revealed a 2.9% base salary increase projection in 2012 for salaried exempt, executives, salaried nonexempt and non-union hourly workers. This is up slightly from 2011…

With employers increasingly embracing mobile app technology for delivering benefits information, more vendors are getting into the game to serve the growing market. Enter the latest, Left Coast Solutions, which has developed iJoin, an application for smartphones and other mobile devices that helps investors determine how much they need to save for retirement to replace their monthly income. …

They may long to give up their daily commutes and have wide-open schedules, but far too many baby boomers are largely unprepared to leave their jobs, according to a new report by the Insured Retirement Institute.

The U.S. Department of Labor has slightly delayed the deadlines on significant new affirmative obligations for fiduciaries of retirement plans subject to the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. Although the deadlines have been pushed back to April 1, 2012, employers should be preparing now to ensure that they are ready to comply with the new requirements. …

401(k) investors and sponsors are likely to stand up and take notice of the fees that will be clearly presented to them in April, particularly the fact that investors pay most of the administration fees. These administration fees, or expense ratios, cover not just fund management but also recordkeeping, auditing and broker commissions.

Longer life expectancies and the individual responsibility for retirement savings are combining to challenge conventional thinking and to re-shape the relationships between employers and their older employees. Individual retirement savings, primarily through 401(k) plans, are now being evaluated in terms of benefit adequacy and secure monthly income in retirement. Increasing life expectancies mean that workers must save enough to last for 20 to 30 years of retirement . . . if they retire at 65. …