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.

An upcoming event in Washington, DC, to be held on March 30^th and hosted by the Financial Services Roundtable, promises to be both highly-interesting and informative, addressing the very latest in retirement plan portability research and development.

The event, Retirement Plan Portability & Public Policy: Unlocking the potential in portability, will take place at the Financial Services Roundtable’s headquarters [map] from 10:30 a.m. to Noon, and is free to attend. Click here to view a full agenda. 

Over the past year, the Department of Labor’s Fiduciary Rule has been highly-visible, presenting major ramifications for the retirement industry and looming large on the radar screens of retirement services providers.  

The underlying rationale for the rule, as stated by the Obama administration in an April 6, 2016 press briefing, was to save retirement investors $17 billion per year in lost retirement savings that result from conflicts of interest in retirement advice. Certainly, anything that protects $17 billion in retirement savings is a worthy goal, if it helps more Americans meet their retirement income needs.
However, there’s a larger hole in our retirement system – cash-out leakage – that inflicts far greater harm to American retirement savers, yet this threat continues to fly beneath our collective radar.   

“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.

On February 3^rd, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the world’s largest business federation representing the interests of more than 3 million businesses, released Securing America’s Retirement, their legislative roadmap aimed at strengthening the U.S. retirement system.

The Chamber’s goals are admirable.

Baby boomers will never forget Neil Armstrong’s famous quote in 1969, after becoming the first human being to set foot on the moon:

“That’s one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Today, America faces a different, more down-to-earth challenge: delivering our citizens a comfortable and timely retirement. And similar to the moon landing – a ‘small step’ in the right direction can have a huge impact on the course of our lives.

In consolidated testimony before the ERISA Advisory Council  on the topic of Participant Plan Transfers and Account Consolidation for the Advancement of Lifetime Plan Participation, EBRI’s Craig Copeland and Retirement Clearinghouse’s Tom Johnson presented “Auto Portability Research & Simulation: Automating Plan-to-Plan Transfers for Small Accounts” – providing the Council with the latest information & research on Auto Portability, as well as describing the present state of plan-to-plan transfers (“roll-ins”).

“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.

In his latest article in MarketWatch, posted on New Year’s Eve, RCH President, CEO and RetireMentor Spencer Williams counsels those who switched jobs in 2016 to make their New Year’s resolutions to roll-in all of their retirement savings accounts – not just the account in their most recent prior-employer plan – into their new-employer plan.

Under-participation by minorities in America’s 401(k) system represents a significant economic disparity that requires creative, private-sector solutions.

Auto portability – an emerging plan feature that automatically moves small balance accounts forward when participants change jobs – could play a critical role in helping to bridge the participation gap.