Spencer Williams

If you’ve ever broken a bone—playing sports, engaging in outdoor activities, or even just from a slip and fall—it doesn’t take long before the pain signals that you need to go see a doctor, and the sooner the better. The friction encountered while moving a retirement savings account from an old-employer plan to a current-employer plan when changing jobs sends similar pain signals through most participants. With the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) indicating that the average participant will have 7.4 jobs in their adult working career, the risk of participants incurring a fracture in their retirement savings is very high.

“So, whose ox are you goring with auto portability?”

This is what a senior, well-respected retirement policy official asked my team at a sit-down meeting in Washington, D.C. Over the course of her long career, she had heard innumerable proposals to correct the savings shortfall in the U.S. retirement system. Many of them had a downside for at least one constituency in the retirement services universe, and she assumed that auto portability had one too.

This video presentation is designed to give the viewer a basic understanding of the Auto Portability Simulation (APS), which models the operation and benefits of Auto Portability.

“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes” is a quote often attributed to Mark Twain. The same is true of myths about saving for retirement, and retirement services professionals should take it to heart as we begin 2017.

Beginning today, and in the coming weeks ahead, Retirement Clearinghouse will be rolling out our new corporate logo, as part of the ongoing evolution of our retirement savings portability services.

For more than a year now, we have been working with the research team at the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI), Dr. Ricki Ingalls of Texas State University, and Boston Research Technologies to develop the Auto Portability Simulation (APS). The APS is a robust, quantitatively-based simulation that measures the size, characteristics and behaviors of America’s increasingly mobile workforce. The key findings from that work demonstrate the potential to dramatically reduce retirement plan cash-outs by identifying the long-term, systemic benefits of routine and standardized account consolidation at the time of a participant’s job-change—a technology-based innovation called Auto Portability.

It is intuitive to observe that the easiest way for a plan participant to achieve lifetime participation in the U.S. retirement system is to work for the same employer for 40 years or more. But in today’s highly mobile workforce, that rarely happens. According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI), the average American will change jobs more than seven times during a 40-year working life, indicating that a participant’s average tenure with each employer will be a little over five years. So what can be done to help the vast majority of participants that simply won’t work for one employer for their entire careers? 

It’s ironic that, as we observe another “National Save for Retirement Week,” the retirement system we have in this country isn’t really a “system” at all.

Hey, plan sponsors: Imagine for a moment that your active participants are Tom Cruise from Mission: Impossible (or Barbara Bain, Peter Graves and Martin Landau, for those of us who remember the classic TV series).

Have you ever received a letter with the notice “Time Sensitive Material! Open Immediately!” boldly splashed across the outside of the envelope, only to sigh with disappointment with what’s on the inside?  While the disappointment of false advertising so often seems to be the case with “junk mail,” the warning turns out to be true when we examine the behaviors of retirement plan participants who have recently changed jobs.