Managing Your Practice
The DOL recently published a “Q&A on Small Savers” which leads off by stating, “Small IRA savers may not be who you think they are,” and goes on to point out that more than two-thirds of small-IRA owners may have small IRAs, but they are “wealthy and upper-middle class households.”The six-...
READ MORE
Suppose you have a client who has a mortgage loan but also $57,000 in consumer debt, of which approximately $13,000 is from loans taken on her 403(b) accounts. In Tech Talk, Ellie Lowder tells us what happens to those loans if she files for bankruptcy.
READ MORE
If you have comments on the Department of Labor’s (DOL) fiduciary reproposal, you only have a couple of weeks to share them. The DOL announced Sept. 8 that the public comment period will close on Thursday, Sept. 24, 2015, and that no hand-delivered comments will be accepted after 6:00 p.m. ET on...
READ MORE
If your plan sponsor clients haven’t filed Form 5500 as required, they could soon be hearing from the IRS.Recently the Internal Revenue Service’s Employee Plans Compliance unit (EPCU) announced plans to collaborate with the Department of Labor’s Office of the Chief Accountant (OCA) to contact Form...
READ MORE
One of the important sources of retirement income, Social Security, is seriously misunderstood. In MarketBeat, Ellie Lowder discusses the importance of Social Security and of projecting its role in funding retirement.
READ MORE
The California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) is considering adopting new risk-mitigating strategies — investing a portion of its holdings in more stable funds not subject to the vagaries of a volatile stock market. The plan could shift up to $20 billion of CalSTRS’ $191 billion into...
READ MORE
Newer is not always better, and Moody’s Investor Service has provided fresh proof — at least for defined benefit plans. According to Pensions & Investments, a report Moody’s released Sept. 1 says that the IRS’ continued use of existing mortality tables could save DB plans $18 billion or more....
READ MORE
An at least tacit understanding of the importance of saving for retirement may be a common language of the current workforce, but the three generations that compose the bulk of it — Baby Boomers, Generation X and Millennials — each speak their own dialect. In “Generational Differences: Ready or Not...
READ MORE
We may be in the cyber age, but don’t be too quick to discount the personal — at least regarding defined contribution plan education and assistance. Retirement planning service provider PlanVision found in a recent study that a strong majority of plan participants prefer personal guidance.Plan...
READ MORE
Plan sponsors should always keep a close eye on whether a worker is classified as an employee or an independent contractor since this has a significant effect on retirement plans. In MarketBeat, Michael Webb outlines differences under current law between and employees and independent contractors,...
READ MORE
A strong majority of U.S. workers are saving for retirement, but. A certain percentage is not, and that segment has grown slightly recently, two studies show.Bankrate in its Financial Security Index for August reports that 10% of U.S. workers are not saving for retirement, and didn’t last year...
READ MORE
More than half the states have refreshed their cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) to public-sector pension plans in the last six years. A recent report by the National Association of State Retirement Administrators, “NASRA Issue Brief: Cost-of-Living Adjustments,” outlines the changes those states...
READ MORE
Retirement plan participation is far from uniform in the Tar Heel State, especially when it comes to 403(b) plans, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).A new NBER study, “Supplemental Plan Offerings and Retirement Saving Choices: An Analysis of North Carolina School...
READ MORE
There were four days of hearings on the Department of Labor’s proposed fiduciary rule and I kept waiting… and watching… and waiting. But it never came up. And that surprised me.You see, I was fully expecting someone to ask these two questions: “What about individuals who actually want to be...
READ MORE
An IRS audit is not exactly a sought-after experience. But it is possible to take a look at a plan and see if it is at risk of one, and there are best practices one can take after an audit. The recent 2015 NTSA 403(b) Summit offered insights on both, as Diane Capone discusses in MarketBeat.
READ MORE
Only 22% of individuals who owned a traditional or Roth IRA took a withdrawal in 2013, a percentage largely driven by activity among individuals ages 70½ or older.According to a report by the non-partisan Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI), 65% of the individuals who took a withdrawal were...
READ MORE
With many American workers saying they could have saved more, and sooner, a large majority of employees support access to plans with automatic enrollment, according to new studies.American Century Investments’ third annual “Defined Contribution Plan Participation Study” interviewed 2,031 DC plan...
READ MORE
Require general partners to do a better job of disclosing private equity fees. That’s the message that treasurers from states in every region of the United States, as well as two of its largest cities, sent to Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Mary Jo White in a recent letter.The treasurers...
READ MORE
Renowned French author André Gide once famously remarked, “Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” So it felt at times during Day four of the Department of Labor’s (DOL) public hearing on its fiduciary rule.To be fair,...
READ MORE
The IRS has issued IRA required minimum distribution (RMD) worksheets for figuring this year’s required withdrawals from traditional IRAs. One of the worksheets concerns RMDs from traditional IRAs, and the other concerns RMDs if a spouse who is more than 10 years younger than the IRA holder is the...
READ MORE
Pages
Most Popular
