Thomas Hawkins

The case for auto portability, the new 401(k) plan default feature that automatically transfers small-balance retirement savings when participants change jobs, has always been strong. Now, with the April 22^nd release of EBRI’s 31^st Annual Retirement Confidence Survey (RCS), the case has grown stronger.
 

America’s 401(k) system, long plagued by friction, produces $92.4 billion of excessive cash-out leakage annually.   In recent years and culminating in 2021, the private sector has finally “cracked the code” and is delivering innovative fintech solutions, combined with education and personal assistance to reduce friction and to enable true 401(k) portability.

When research performed 8 years ago reveals that your 401(k) plan, by turning on portability and consolidation for all participants, has halved cashout leakage and dramatically reduced its small account problem, what do you do for an encore?

401(k) Plan Sponsors: How would you like to radically boost your participants’ financial wellness, increase your plan’s assets, reduce your plan’s costs, and prevent missing participants?

Adopting this one simple and proven trick – retirement savings portability – delivers all this and more!

The problem of missing participants in employer-sponsored retirement plans is one of the most important, yet perplexing issues facing plan sponsors, and for good reason.

Ensuring that participants (or their beneficiaries) receive their benefits is the essence of an employer’s fiduciary responsibility – and missing or unresponsive participants who become separated from those benefits can generate significant risks for plan fiduciaries.

On 1/26/21, Retirement Clearinghouse (RCH) released a study that advances the art and science of locating missing 401(k) plan participants. The study – Improving the Effectiveness of Electronic Missing Participant Searches – comes on the heels of U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) guidance on the topic and is highly-useful for plan sponsors who utilize electronic searches, or “e-Searches” as they are referenced in the study.

401(k) plan sponsors know all too well that sunlight – coming in the form of transparent fees and disclosures – is vital to fulfilling their fiduciary duty to act in the best interest of their participants.

In the 1960’s, counter-culture guru Timothy Leary urged a generation to “turn on, tune in and drop out.” It’s probably a good thing that I didn’t take his advice….at least not the “drop out” part! 
 

Based on solid research, we’ve long known that typical automatic rollover IRAs result in high levels of cashout leakage. We’ve also suspected that they’ve contributed to an explosion of small-balance IRAs.
 

As I wrote in a previous article, 401(k) automated portability is an idea whose time has come. To achieve that vision, how will we get from the present state to full automation of the plan-to-plan roll-in process? 

This article, as well as the video below, offers readers a roadmap for the progression from ‘tired’ to ‘wired’ and finally, to the ‘inspired’ state that will eventually characterize 401(k) roll-ins.